On Fri, 25 May 2001, Jim Till wrote: > At the arXiv archive, one section of the FAQ section (under Miscellaneous) > addresses the question: "Why don't you release statistics about paper > retrieval?". (See: http://xxx.lanl.gov/help/faq/statfaq). > > The short answer provided is: "Such 'statistics' are difficult to assess > for a variety of reasons".
So are citation statistics. So? > "It could be argued perhaps correctly that statistics may provide some > useful information at least on the relative popularity of submissions, > since the distributed access and other factors may be subsumable into some > overall scale factor. But even this information is ambiguous in many > cases, and publicizing, even when accurate, could merely accentuate > faddishness in fields already excessively faddish". Correct. So? > "Most significantly, however, there is a strong philosophic reason for not > publicizing (or even saving) these statistics. When one browses in a > library it is very important (in fact legislated) that big brother is not > watching through a camera mounted on the wall; for the benefit of readers > it is very important to maintain in every way possible this sense of > freedom from monitoring in the electronic realm". Hit rates do not monitor WHO is hitting X, just HOW MANY are hitting X. -------------------------------------------------------------------- Stevan Harnad [email protected] Professor of Cognitive Science [email protected] Department of Electronics and phone: +44 23-80 592-582 Computer Science fax: +44 23-80 592-865 University of Southampton http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/ Highfield, Southampton http://www.princeton.edu/~harnad/ SO17 1BJ UNITED KINGDOM
