Download impact predicts citation impact

[Stevan Harnad]

On Fri, 4 Mar 2005, herbert van de sompel wrote:

> hi Stevan,
>
> I thought you might be interested in the following paper:
>
> Johan Bollen, Herbert Van de Sompel, Joan Smith, Rick Luce.  2005. Toward
> alternative metrics of journal impact: A comparison of download and citation
> data. 34 pages, accepted by Information Processing and Management, special issue
> on Informetrics.  preprint at http://arxiv.org/abs/cs.DL/0503007
>
> The first author, Johan Bollen (see cc), has recently joined my team in Los
> Alamos to continue work in the realm of what is described in the paper.  We hope
> to have some more interesting things to report on in a few months.  And we will
> be happy to keep you posted.

Hi Herb,

Thanks for your very interesting paper, which I am branching
to the OAI-citation and Sigmetrics groups.

We will cite it in the following paper, which you may also find of
interest:

    Brody, T. and Harnad, S. (2005) Earlier Web Usage Statistics
    as Predictors of Later Citation Impact. Technical Report, ECS,
    University of Southampton http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/10647/

You may also like to look at Tim's download/citation correlator:
    http://citebase.eprints.org/analysis/correlation.php
which has now been up for several years, as well as the latest
feature he has added to citebase, allowing download stats to be
displayed, along with citation stats:
    http://citebase.eprints.org/cgi-bin/downloads?author=Bollen,J

You will not be too satisfied with the data for Johan, but that is only
because we have alas still not succeeded (despite trying for several years
now) in persuading Simeon Warner & Paul Ginsparg that this is a valuable
enough statistic to warrant letting us use the US ArXiv usage stats;
as it stands, it is just based on the data from our UK ArXiv mirror.

To get an idea of its true potential power, try:
    http://citebase.eprints.org/cgi-bin/downloads?author=Witten,E

The download/citation correlator would of course also be substantially
more powerful, sensitive and useful if it were based on the US ArXiv data
instead of just the UK mirror data. (In my opinion, this is just
one further reason why it is an *extremely* bad idea to allow a vast
collective database like ArXiv to become the "property" and prerogative
of one person. This is also one of the many reasons why I am working
so hard to ensure that self-archiving generalizes as distributed and
institution-based rather than central...)

I look forward to seeing more of your and Johan's work.

Cheers, Stevan

>
> cheers
>
> herbert
>
> --
> Herbert Van de Sompel
> Digital Library Research & Prototyping
> Los Alamos National Laboratory, Research Library
> http://public.lanl.gov/herbertv/
> tel. +1 505 667 1267
>
>