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Written by: Ian Hickman
What Fraction of Downloads are due to Citations?
A way to tell if a user follows up a citation in a paper is to store all the citations from each paper downloaded, checking if each of these citations are downloaded. The results are as follows:
| Total Downloads | 238787 |
| Relevant Downloads | 225041 |
| Referenced Downloads | 30730 |
| Percent followed | 13.7% |
The relevant downloads are the number of downloads that were not the first in a (i.e. they had a download before them that could possible cite them). The referenced downloads had been cited by a paper that had been downloaded earlier by that user. As you can see 13.7% of papers that are downloaded have had a paper downloaded before them (by the same user) that cites them.
Are Red or Orange links followed mostly?
Of this 13.7% do users follow red or orange links mostly, that is do users see the paper referenced and simply type in the address of that paper (red links), or do the users go to the trouble of searching for a specific paper title (orange links). Their are two graphs shown below, the first is the proportions of red and orange links in the archive, the second is the proportion of red and orange links followed.
As you can see red links are followed far more than orange links. When citation linking is implemented my hypothesis is that the proportion of red and orange links followed will be similar to the proportions currently in the archive, as users will simply click on the link and go to the next paper.
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