ACM Usage Statistics

ACM Counter 5 Compliant Usage Statistics

The ACM provides COUNTER 5 compliant usage statistics to institutions which subscribe to the ACM Digital Library. The usage statistics are generated on a monthly basis. If you are an administrator at your organization and would like access to these usage reports, or you are having trouble logging into your institution’s account, please contact us at [email protected].

SUSHI

COUNTER 5 compliancy means that ACM’s usage statistics are also SUSHI (Standardized Usage Statistics Harvesting Initiative) compliant. SUSHI enables a library to gather their usage statistics across multiple publisher platforms without having to log into each search and compile usage statistics manually. For more information on SUSHI compliance, please go to http://www.niso.org/workrooms/sushi.

ACM Usage Reports

Standardized usage statistics are sometimes misleading. Each publisher has a different portfolio of publications with a wide range of content-types and formats available for download. In ACM’s case, the ACM Digital Library consists of non-journal and non-pdf or html content. Due to the nature of the subject matter and ACM’s role as the leading conference and scholarly events organizer in the field of computer science, the ACM Digital Library contains a significant number of conference proceedings that contribute to the overall makeup of the ACM Digital Library archive. As COUNTER 5 reports do not provide detailed usage information for conference proceedings, it is important for librarians to recognize the limitations of the COUNTER 5 reports that ACM makes available for evaluation purposes.

The available reports include standard COUNTER 5 reports such as JR1 and JR4. However, none of these standard reports include usage for conference proceedings which are critically important to the fields of computer science and IT, and make up over two thirds (67%) of the full text articles that are included in the ACM Digital Library.

In addition, across the entire ACM Digital Library user base on average approximately 66% of its total usage occurs with ACM conference proceedings articles with the remaining activity being mostly related to ACM journal articles. To view all of the usage of the ACM Digital Library, it’s important to review the report entitled ‘Article Titles: Article Requests by Month and Type’. This report will show the total full-text downloads across all the media types that are in the Digital Library on a monthly basis.