{"id":16478,"date":"2016-06-03T16:47:29","date_gmt":"2016-06-03T15:47:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.ch.imperial.ac.uk\/rzepa\/blog\/?p=16478"},"modified":"2016-06-26T08:21:27","modified_gmt":"2016-06-26T07:21:27","slug":"500-chemical-twists-a-chalk-and-cheese-comparison-of-the-impacts-of-blog-posts-and-journal-articles","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ch.ic.ac.uk\/rzepa\/blog\/?p=16478","title":{"rendered":"500 chemical twists: a (chalk and cheese) comparison of the impacts of blog posts and journal articles."},"content":{"rendered":"
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\n\tThe title might give it away; this is my 500th blog post, the first<\/a> having come some eight years ago. Very little online activity nowadays is excluded from measurement and so it is no surprise that this blog and another of my "other" scholarly endeavours, viz<\/em> publishing in traditional journals, attract such "metrics" or statistics. The h-index<\/a> is a well-known but somewhat controversial measure of the impact of journal articles; here I thought I might instead take a look at three less familiar ones – one relating to blogging, one specific to journal publishing and one to research data.\n<\/p>\n

\n\tFirst, an update on the accumulated outreach of this blog over this seven-year period. The total number of country domains measured is 190. The African continent still has quite a few areas with zero hits (as does Svalbard, with a population of only 2600 for a land mass area 61,000 km2 <\/sup>or 23 km2<\/sup> per person). Given the low blog readership density on the African continent, it would be interesting to find out whether journal readership is any better.\n<\/p>\n

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\n\tNext, I look at the temporal distribution for individual posts. The first<\/a> has attracted the highest total; in five years it has had 19,262 views (the diagram below shows the number of views per day). Four others exceed 10,000 and 80 exceed 1000 views.\n<\/p>\n

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\n\tOf these five, the next<\/a> is the oldest, going back to 2009. I was very surprised to find such longevity, with the number of views increasing rather than decreasing with the passage of time.\n<\/p>\n

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\n\tSo time now to compare these statistics with the journals. And of course its chalk and cheese. A "view" for a post means someone (or something) accessing the post URL, which is then recorded in the server log. Resolving the URL does at least load the entire content of the post; whether its read or not is of course not recorded. Importantly, if you want to view the content at some later stage, a new "view" has to be made (although some browsers do save a web page and allow offline viewing at a later stage, but I suspect this usage is low). With electronic journal access, it's rather different. Access to an article is now predominantly via two mechanisms:\n<\/p>\n

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  1. \n\t\tFrom the table of contents (this is somewhat analogous to browsing a blog)\n\t<\/li>\n
  2. \n\t\tFrom the article DOI.\n\t<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    \n\tStatistics for these two methods are gathered differently. The new CrossRef resource chronograph.labs.crossref.org<\/a> (CrossRef allocate all journal DOIs) can be used to measure what they call DOI "resolutions". A DOI resolution however leads one only to what is called the "landing page", where the interested reader can view the title, the graphical abstract and some other metadata. It does not mean of course that they go on to actually view the article (as HTML, equivalent to the blog above, or probably more often by downloading a PDF file). Here are a few results using this method:\n<\/p>\n