So a while ago, I flagged an entry from Scott McLeod entitled “Reflecting on my work: Google Scholar v. Google Analytics,” where he writes:
Just leaving these two tables here as I reflect on the impact of my work and where I choose to put it. The scale isn’t even close. And this doesn’t even factor in interactivity… (e.g., my 80 blog posts that have received at least 30 comments, including one that has received 618!)
Over 4.4 million page views and counting!
As someone who has cultivated my open scholarship networks for a long time, I was curious as to what my statistics looked like. So starting with the blog…
So I have posted some 26,050 blog entries since March 2005. During that period of time, people have visited the homepage of my blog (i.e., just https:///virtualschooling.wordpress.com) 194, 248 times and the most viewed entry was on on the School of Tomorrow (which has been viewed 14,531 times). I have two entries that have been viewed more than 10,000 times, four entries viewed more than 5,000 times, 19 entries viewed more than 2,500 times, and 54 entries views more than 1,000 times. There have been a total of 8,933 comments and trackbacks. The statistics don’t give me a breakdown of how many comments vs. trackbacks, but my own gut tells me that well over half of those 8,933 are trackbacks (maybe even as many as two thirds). Additionally, close to half of the actual comments are from me, as I respond to engage with everyone who takes the time to leave a comment on one of my blog entries. So we can assume that I have somewhere between ~1,500 and ~2,200 actual comments.
Now in comparison to some of my open scholarship networks.
So Google Scholar is what Scott chose to measure the impact of his academic writing, which I would argue is the worse one to use because it only reports citations. So in comparison, almost 5,000 people have cited my research compared to almost 200,000 have his my blog at one point or another. Almost 5,000 people have cited by work, but I have four blog entries that have more than 5,000 views. But citations represent the number of other academic writers who felt that one or more pieces of my writing were the best reference to support something they had written. It certainly doesn’t represent the number of people that have viewed or read the work or had any level of engagement with that writing.
Now some of the other open scholarship networks do a bit better job of this.
The two networks that I have spent the most time cultivating have been Academia and ResearchGate. With the free analytics available from Academia, it only provides overall statistics for 30 days or 60 days. So over the past 60 days there have been 1,967 views online and 441 downloads. As you can see from the image above, there are two pieces of research that have more than 3,000 all-time views and six pieces of research that have more than 1,000 views.
In terms of ResearchGate, you can see that there have been 43,571 reads of my research on this platform. About two thirds of those reads were people going to the page to see the abstract and citation details – as well as the first page or two of the manuscript. There were 16,194 times where someone clicked on the “View Full Text” button.
Looking at some of the systems I use less frequently…
So once again I have about 20,000 views of my research from Mendeley and about 45,000 views of my research on TouroScholar (or one of the BE Press digital commons of my former universities).
Finally, while I use the network a fair amount, I’m always never sure as to the value of the network when it comes to Slideshare.
So Slideshare only provides analytics for the past year. As you can see, there were roughly 9,000 views of my presentation slides over the past year.
If you look at these networks in an overview perspective – as those views on ResearchGate are unique from the views on Mendeley – there have been about 140,000 views of my research on all of my networks. And that should be keeping in mind that I only have 60 days of data with Academia and one year of data with Slideshare.
Now Scott makes the implicit argument that he should and does invest time in his blog over his academic scholarship because that is what has the impact on the communities or groups that he wishes to engage. I’d actually argue that what will have an impact on the communities and/or groups that you wish to engage will be where you choose to put your time. I spend a lot more time making my scholarship available to the average individual interested in education. I post it on several open scholarship networks and them promote it on my blog and through my Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. Whereas the vast majority of items that get posted to my blog are things that copy and paste from my e-mail, simply to pass along to the community. If I get a chance to write one content heavy entry (like this one) every couple of months, I’m lucky.
On the other hand, Scott will take the time to post two or three content heavy, thoughtful blog entries each month. Scott spends meaningful time on his blog, and thus gets meaningful engagement there. I tend to spend much less meaningful time on my blog, but the impact that I am having through my open scholarship networks is much more significant. Engagement will happen where you choose to invest your time.
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