On Thu, 24 May 2001, Tim Brody wrote (about my proposed 2nd criterion for evaluation of an eprint archive, which was: 2) its suitability for yielding citation data [an 'impact-ranking' criterion?]):
[tb]> One might also add the facility to export "hit" data, as an [tb]> alternative criterion (or any other raw statistical data?). What kind of raw statistical data might be most useful, in the future, for 'impact-ranking'? 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". The longer answer also includes the comments that: "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". And, "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". Thought-provoking comments? Jim Till University of Toronto
