Re: ecitations -- the missing ingredient for eprint success?

From: Owen Cliffe <oc197_at_ECS.SOTON.AC.UK>
Date: Sun, 23 Apr 2000 00:45:15 +0100

> whole. And anyway means exist to get a fair estimate of paper visitation --
> a paper getting all its visitations in a particular month (suggestion
> linkage to a particular course) might be weighted against one with the same
> number spread over the year.

Unfortunately the number of hits a page receives isn't really representative
of the number of times that someone has /chosen/ to visit that page,
Hit counting in its many forms is a useful statistic for example
re-structuring sites but as an indicator of general interest in pages it
is a very shaky tool. For example a page's hit count may be artificially
high because it contained a certain unrelated search phrase that was
associated with another paper.

Taking online open-submission news sites as an example,
monitored, peer-review ranking systems seem a highly effective way of
accurately monitoring interest in papers. (News sites like
www.advogato.org and www.slashdot.org use inter-related ratings schemes
where a given item's rating is determined as a function of the authors
credibility level, which intern is determined by both the rankings given
to the authors previous submissions and a separate peer-to-peer ranking
system where one author directly rates another. The former is the
mechanism that google employs to rank its search results.)


Owen Cliffe
Received on Mon Jan 24 2000 - 19:17:43 GMT