Usage Bibliometrics (Downloads and COUNTER)
Usage bibliometrics measures the impact of scholarly works from how often they are downloaded and viewed rather than how often they are cited. Drawing on server and publisher logs standardized through the COUNTER code of practice, it turns raw access events into impact indicators such as the usage factor. The MESUR project led by Johan Bollen and Herbert Van de Sompel was pivotal: their 2008 work demonstrated usage-based impact metrics built from large-scale usage logs, and their 2009 principal component analysis of thirty-nine impact measures showed that scientific impact is multidimensional, with usage metrics occupying a distinct region of the space from citation metrics. Usage signals accrue almost immediately and reflect a far larger readership than the subset of authors who eventually cite, making them an early and broad complement to citation analysis, provided the logs are carefully standardized.
Source record
Citations copied verbatim from the method’s source record. No claim-level verification is inferred from them.
- Bollen, J., Van de Sompel, H., Hagberg, A., & Chute, R. (2009). A Principal Component Analysis of 39 Scientific Impact Measures. PLoS ONE, 4(6), e6022. · DOI 10.1371/journal.pone.0006022
- Bollen, J., Van de Sompel, H., & Rodriguez, M. A. (2008). Towards usage-based impact metrics: first results from the MESUR project. Proceedings of the 8th ACM/IEEE-CS Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL), 231-240. · DOI 10.1145/1378889.1378928
Curated claims
Claims persisted in the evidence ledger, each with its own assessment.
This view does not invent a claim assessment when the ledger has none.
Related methods
Generated from the method graph and shown as machine-suggested relations — no evidence claim is inferred.