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Access statistics report 1

EL Publishing: access statistics for the first month

3rd September 2014

Recently EL Publishing passed the 1-month point since its launch on 18th July 2014. In order to share information about access with authors and readers - and to help with future comparisons - we created this report on website access and the downloads of papers from the catalogue.

While web server statistics should be interpreted with caution, these are the basic figures:

Unique visitors All visits Pages Hits
1901 3737 14356 59181

Figure 1: server statistics July 18 - Aug 18 2014

Unique visitors = server's estimate of the number of distinct people accessing the site during the period, regardless of how often each visited
All visits = server's estimate of the number of times the site was accessed, regardless of repeats by the same people
Pages = server's estimate of the total number of times that pages of the site were viewed
Hits = raw number of access requests to the server (includes requests for images, stylesheets, code, uncompleted pages etc)

Needless to say, the site was more highly accessed in its first few days due to launch promotion and spreading news of the new resources, as well as the fact that the launch co-incided with the release of the latest LDD volume 12. The few days following the launch saw an average of about 400 visitors per day, which subsequently settled down to around a steady 130 visits per day.

We are concerned not only to provide Open Access, but also to provide effective and equitable access to a variety of readers. The site was accessed from over 100 different countries. The top-accessing countries (for August, to avoid any launch effect bias) are listed below, showing a significant coverage across regions.

  1. United States
  2. Great Britain
  3. Netherlands
  4. Canada
  5. France
  6. India
  7. Sweden
  8. Ukraine
  9. Poland
  10. Finland
  11. Germany
  12. China
  13. Romania
  14. Australia
  15. Philippines
  16. Hong Kong
  17. Saudi Arabia
  18. Russian Federation
  19. Norway
  20. Latvia
  21. Vietnam
  22. Brazil

Figure 2: Countries in order of site access

As so often, countries in Africa are under-represented in such statistics, but the report actually includes 15 African countries, with a total of 258 downloads; the top African countries by ranking (and all with over 20 downloads) are: Mauritius, Cameroon, Uganda, South Africa, Nigeria, Cote d'Ivoire, and Kenya.

More transparently understandable - and informative - are the download statistics for papers in the series Language Documentation and Description which currently form the bulk of EL Publishing resources.

Over the first month, there were 3162 papers downloaded (an average of 100 per day), which suggests that the majority of visitors downloaded a paper.  

The top 10 downloaded papers were:

  1. Increasing the future usage of endangered language archives (Paul Trilsbeek, Alexander König)
  2. Participatory Culture Documentation on the Tibetan Plateau (Gerald Roche, Ban+de mkhar, Bkra shis bzang po, G.yu lha, Snying dkar skyid, Tshe ring rnam gyal, Zla ba sgrol ma, Charles Kevin Stuart)
  3. Archives and audiences: Toward making endangered language documentations people can read, use, understand, and admire (Anthony C. Woodbury)
  4. The Aslian languages of Malaysia and Thailand: an assessment (Geoffrey Benjamin)
  5. Archiving grammatical descriptions (Sebastian Nordhoff, Harald Hammarström)
  6. Mediating language documentation (Gary Holton)
  7. Language documentation and pedagogy for endangered languages: a mutual revitalisation (David Nathan, Meili Fang)
  8. Editors’ introduction (LDD12) (David Nathan, Peter K. Austin)
  9. Archiving for the community: Engaging local archives in language documentation projects (Joshua Wilbur)
  10. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Data Archive: Connecting communities and research data (Gabrielle Gardiner, Kirsten Thorpe)

Figure 3: Top 10 downloaded papers

Of these papers, most (seven) are in LDD 12 which was released for the launch, and which thus understandably found greater interest. The top 10 papers other than in LDD 12 were:

Finally, we look at the statistics for each volume of Language Documentation and Description, which helps understand thematic trends and the lifetime of papers.

Volume 12 11 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Downloads 955 147 246 63 221 330 244 88 204 247 183 234

Figure 5. Language Documentation and Description, downloads by volume