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Download patterns of journal papers and their influencing factors

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Abstract

A two-step cluster analysis was performed on the absolute downloads and the relative downloads of Chinese journal papers published between 2006 and 2008. Four patterns were identified from the perspective of absolute downloads; the first three patterns can be expressed as power functions, signifying their evident aging trends, although this does not apply to pattern 4. Two patterns were identified from the perspective of relative downloads, and both present power distributions with minor differences in decline speed. Furthermore, we delved into the relationships between total downloads and article features in varying patterns and found that there are only weak correlations between total downloads and title length, number of authors, and number of keywords. However, there are moderate to high correlations between initial downloads—defined as downloads made during the first year after publication—and total downloads, suggesting that it is possible to forecast total downloads according to initial downloads. Additionally, it was found that total instances of highly downloaded papers have no correlations with article features.

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Acknowledgements

The authors are grateful to China National Knowledge Internet (CNKI) for making available the download files analyzed in this paper.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Faculty of Economics and Management, East China Normal University, Shanghai, 200241, People’s Republic of China

    Yufeng Duan & Zequan Xiong

  2. Institute for Academic Evaluation and Development, East China Normal University, Shanghai, 200241, People’s Republic of China

    Yufeng Duan

  3. Library, East China Normal University, Shanghai, 200241, People’s Republic of China

    Zequan Xiong

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  1. Yufeng Duan
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  2. Zequan Xiong
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Correspondence to Zequan Xiong.

Appendix

Appendix

See Table 13.

Table 13 Basic information for 11 journals
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Duan, Y., Xiong, Z. Download patterns of journal papers and their influencing factors. Scientometrics 112, 1761–1775 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-017-2456-1

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