Gathering Statistics
Gathering of statistics is a challenge. The Public Knowledge Project – the entity that created the Open Journal Systems platform – is working on making more statistics available in one aggregated format. For the foreseeable future, however, we have to make due by collecting statistics from multiple locations.
Counter
Access to Counter statistics is available at this URL for York Digital Journals: http://pi.library.yorku.ca/ojs/stats/counter/
Counter lists total number of galley downloads per month (in other words, it tells you how many times an article has actually been downloaded). The galley refers to either full text PDF downloads, or full text HTML downloads. (The HTML downloads are rarely offered by journals, as the standard is PDF.) For subscription-based journals, note that these download numbers are generally much lower.
Google Analytics
Google Analytics has been made available for each York Digital Journal, and can be accessed via special email and password through: http://www.google.com/analytics/
Contact akosavic@yorku.ca for your username and password.
This service provides detailed information about visitors and site access. It is most useful for tracking unique site visitors on a monthly basis, as well as geographic sources of traffic. The statistics it provides are filtered for web crawlers, which essentially means that your stats will not be inflated.
When clicking on Content > Content by Title on the left sidebar of the Google Analytics interface, one can obtain a crude breakdown of how many times a particular page has been accessed, but Counter provides a better breakdown by month for full-text article access.
The York Digital Journals team has created several custom reports that may be helpful to you for presenting data for grant applications.
To access these reports, click on Custom Reporting in the left sidebar upon logging in.
We have created 3 custom reports, called:
Visits and views per month
Unique visitors by country/territory
Unique visitors by continent
Click on the report that you would like to see. Edit the date range in the top right hand corner to display a desired range.
AWStats
AWStats is an open source server log anaylsis tool. We have enabled AWStats tracking for York Digital Journals. Please contact YDJ for your special AWStats URL.
The strength of AWStats is its ability to filter out false hits from web crawlers, and providing detailed daily usage information in an easy to read format. The statistics it provides are very similar to those made available through Google Analytics. These include number of unique visitors, number of visits, number of pages accessed and number of hits.
An added bonus of AWStats, however, is that it captures keywords and keyphrases entered by users in various search engines that have lead them to the site.
OJS Stats Reports
Available at: http://pi.library.yorku.ca/ojs/stats/reports/
This is a locally developed solution that captures the cumulative number of abstract views and galley views (full text downloads) for York Digital Journals on a monthly basis. To determine monthly totals, one needs to subtract one month from another to account for the cumulative effect.
The numbers listed here are likely to be inflated, as they are extracted directly from the database of York Digital Journals. This database is unable to filter out hits from web crawlers.
