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Scientists are working overtime: when do scientists download scientific papers?

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Abstract

In this study, we track and analyze publication downloads from Sci-Hub to reconstruct scientists' activity patterns. We compare downloads from Sci-Hub and Springer, and find that, the work rhythms in working hours illustrated by downloads from the both platforms are very similar, however, when scientists are working overtime (at nights and weekends), Sci-Hub is more heavily used than copyrighted platforms to access scholarly publications. Scientists around the world are working overtime, but scientists in different countries have different working patterns. Scientists' preferences for different platforms are influenced by a variety of factors such as working times and workplace arrangements. There are variations by country in terms of whether scientists prefer to work overtime at night, at the weekend, or both at night and on the weekend.

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Acknowledgements

This study's preprint has been made available on arxiv (Geng et al. 2021). This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (71974029).

Funding

Funding was provided by National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 71974029).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. WISE Lab, Institute of Science of Science and S&T Management, Dalian University of Technology, Dalian, 116024, China

    Yu Geng, Renmeng Cao, Wencan Tian, Guangyao Zhang & Xianwen Wang

  2. Alibaba Research Center for Complexity Sciences, Hangzhou Normal University, Hangzhou, 311121, China

    Xiaopu Han

  3. Institute of Information Economy and Alibaba Business School, Hangzhou Normal University, Hangzhou, 311121, China

    Xiaopu Han

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  1. Yu Geng
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  2. Renmeng Cao
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  3. Xiaopu Han
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  4. Wencan Tian
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Correspondence to Xianwen Wang.

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Geng, Y., Cao, R., Han, X. et al. Scientists are working overtime: when do scientists download scientific papers?. Scientometrics 127, 6413–6429 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-022-04524-1

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