Downloads vs. Citations: Relationships, Contributing Factors and Beyond

UNSPECIFIED Downloads vs. Citations: Relationships, Contributing Factors and Beyond., 2007 [Conference proceedings]

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English abstract

Citations to 200 top downloaded papers at RePEc, a digital library in economics, were obtained from SSCI and Google Scholar respectively to address questions relating to downloads and their corresponding citations. This study finds that top downloaded documents are used in various degrees when citation is regarded as an indicator of usage. Results also show that a single downloaded paper selected for this study on average receives twice as many citations from Google Scholar as that from SSCI although the latter has been established much earlier in time. According to the coefficients computed, downloads appear having a moderate relationship with citations. However, other measures such as the download vs citation ratio indicate a stronger connection between the two. While author’s reputation positively affect both download and citation frequencies, other factors (e.g., targeted readers and subject content) seem in play differently for the documents that are repeatedly downloaded or cited. In a nutshell, an infrastructure that encourages downloading at digital libraries would eventually lead to higher usage of their resources.

Item type: Conference proceedings
Keywords: digital libraries; downloads; citations; usage analysis; Google Scholar
Subjects: B. Information use and sociology of information > BB. Bibliometric methods
Depositing user: Heting Chu
Date deposited: 09 Feb 2008
Last modified: 02 Oct 2014 12:10
URI: http://hdl.handle.net/10760/11085

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