IJDC Volume 4(1) was published

That's volume 4, issue 1 of the International Journal of Digital Curation... and I didn't report it here. My apologies for that. It's our biggest issue yet, with 10 peer-reviewed papers and 4 general articles, plus 2 editorials (a guest editorial from Malcolm Atkinson, and a normal one from me). There's some really interesting stuff, mostly from the Digital Curation Conference in Edinburgh last year.

There are still a few papers from last year's conference to come, plus a selection from iPres 2008 at the BL in London as well. We are also hoping that some papers will emerge from iPres 09, which has just opened registration, and will shortly be feeding back the results of their selection process to authors. Still time to submit to this year's Digital Curation Conference, guys (submissions close August 7, 2009).

We have done a couple of interesting analyses on the IJDC. One was a "readership analysis" based on web stats, for the period January-June 2009. Eight out of the ten most down-loaded papers in that time were from IJDC 3(2) (the ninth was from 3(1), and the tenth was from IJDC 1). These 10 papers were down-loaded just under 440 times each during that period (395 to 485 times).

The second was to use Google Scholar to assess citations for the issues up to and including 3(2). Issue 4(1) is too recent. I checked the peer-reviewed papers, which GS suggested had been cited 92 times (maximum 11 times for that most-down-loaded Beagrie article from Issue 1), for an average of 3.3 citations per paper. I also checked the articles, although I ignored simple reports, editorials and reviews. Counting peer-reviewed papers and checked general articles, there were 142 citations, for an average of 2.7 citations per item.

Only one out of those eight most down-loaded papers in issue 3(2) had translated those downloads into significant citations, the Cheung paper has 6. But we should give them time, I think; citations per checked item per issue are noticeably lower for more recent items, as you might expect.

• 4.2 in IJDC 1
• 3.3 in IJDC 2(1)
• 4.2 in IJDC 2(2)
• 2.1 in IJDC 3(1)
• 1.4 in IJDC 3(2)

By the way, we are particularly proud of one citation of an IJDC paper from a paper in Nature's Big Data Issue (Howe et al, The future of biocuration). The citation was of the Palmer et al paper in IJDC 2(2)... but Google Scholar failed to notice it. So these figures come with a few caveats!