Tracking Downloads with Centaur

In an earlier post I asked: Is it worth tweeting about academic papers? and I apologized for the quality of the graphs saying “Centaur does not allow users to extract data over a specified period”. Well it is possible to get better graphs although the interface is not easily found. But if anyone is thinking about repeating my experiment with a paper in Centaur it is worth knowing that this link http://centaur.reading.ac.uk/cgi/irstats.cgi?IRS_epchoice=EPrint will take you to an interface where you can select your own papers, dates and graphs.  Now a lot of the interface is quite complex and liable to generate far too much data to be useful. But the daily download can be used with the Centaur ID for an article to get the downloads over the last few weeks so you can see whether that tweet or blog post had any impact.  you get the ID from the items page in Centaur.

So below are the downloads of another paper I co-authored, I’ve done a tweet and the first author wrote a blog post, can you guess when?

 Thanks to Pat Parslow for showing me how to get this graph

In case your interested this paper is:

T.R. Liyanagunawardena, A.A. Adams, N. Rassool, S. Williams, Extending Higher Educational Opportunities through e-Learning: A Case Study from Sri Lanka,  1st International Australasian Conference on Enabling Access to Higher Education Adelaide, South Australia 2011, pp. 291-301.

Centaur entry http://centaur.reading.ac.uk/23842/

 

About Shirley Williams

Shirley Williams is a National Teaching Fellow and Professor of Learning Technologies at the University of Reading. She is involved in a number of research projects related to learning technologies, communities, social networks, Digital identity and knowledge transfer. She also enjoys reading and cooking.
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One Response to Tracking Downloads with Centaur

  1. Thanks for that really useful posting Shirley. I’m not previously managed to navigate to these tools although I had heard of their existence. I’m now a little more digitally ready:-)

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