Database Committee: Top 20 and Top 100 eBook Use

• Total_Item_Investigations - Total number of times a “Content Item” or information related to a “Content Item” was accessed. Double-click filters are applied to these transactions. A “Content Item” could be an “Article”, “Book Chapter”, “Multimedia” files.

• Unique_Item_Investigations - Number of unique “Content Items” investigated in a user-session. Examples of items are “Article”, “Book Chapter”, “Multimedia” files.

• Unique_Title_Investigations - Number of unique eBook titles investigated in a user session. Examples of “Titles” are whole eBooks or chapters of eBooks. Any eBook can only be counted once in a single session.

• Total_Item_Requests - Total number of times a “Content Item” was requested (i.e. the full text or content was downloaded or viewed). For journals, this content item is usually an article. The article could be in PDF, HTML, or another format. If a user downloads the article more than once in a single session, all downloads are counted. If a user clicks on the HTML of an article and then downloads the same article's PDF, the count would be two.

• Unique_Item_Requests - Number of unique “Content Items” requested in a user-session. Examples of content items are “Article”, “Book Chapter”, “Multimedia” files. Unique Item Requests will always be less than or equal to Total Item Requests. Only the first click to download the article is counted in a single session. If different formats are accessed (for example, an HTML and then a PDF), the count is still only one.

• Unique_Title_Requests - Number of unique eBook titles requested in a user session. Examples of “Titles” are  whole eBooks or chapters of eBooks. Any eBook can only be counted once in a single session.If a single user downloads multiple chapters from an ebook, or accesses the ebook several times during a session, all of these would count as 1 unique title request. Each of these interactions would count as item requests and counted in the Total Item Requests counted above.

Note from COUNTER: The Unique_Title_Requests provides comparable usage across book platforms. The Total_Item_Requests shows overall activity; however, numbers between sites will vary significantly based on how the content is delivered (e.g. if a vendor offers chapters only (JSTOR, etc), the total item requests will be higher at the title level then say a vendor who only offers full ebooks).

Stats are from 09/01/2021 - 05/31/2022

The data here is found in the Title Master Reports.

The default view of the graph above contains all six of the metrics defined below for each title, with the total displayed at the end of each title's bar.

For a count that only includes downloads of ebook chapters or whole books, we recommend using the "Measure Names" filter to the right to limit the view to "Total Title Requests" or to "Unique Title Requests" only.

Since a specific item may be downloaded more than once by a single user of by various users, the "Total" number of requests will be equal to or higher than the "Unique" request count, which only counts a specific item once and not each time it is downloaded.