ACM Aggregates Publication Statistics in the ACM Digital Library

Many of you know the ACM Digital Library (http://dl.acm.org) consists of a massive full-text archive of all ACM publications (currently over 300,000 articles and growing at a rate of over 22,000 per year). But many of you may not know the DL also consists of the computing field’s largest dedicated index of bibliographic records (currently over 1.6 million records and growing) called the Guide to Computing Literature, and that starting in 2010 ACM began aggregating these records along with key citation information and online usage data from the DL platform itself to provide a unique and incredibly valuable tool for the computing community at large.

It is now possible to click on any author’s name inside the DL and view a complete record of that author’s publication history, including a dynamically generated list of all of their ACM and non-ACM publications, affiliations, citations, ACM DL download statistics, and other relevant data related to their publications’ history. Currently, over one million author pages exist in the DL, and this figure grows every day!

In addition, ACM aggregates all of this data at the publication level, article level, SIG level, conference level, and most recently the institutional level. All of this data is freely available for users of the ACM DL. For example, Communications‘ page in the DL (see the image here) currently shows the magazine has published 10,691 articles since 1958 with over 117,065 citations in other publications, over 9.2 million downloaded articles from the DL platform, resulting in an average of over 866 downloads per article published and 10.95 citations per article.

On many of these new "bibliometric pages," comparative data also exposes the top cited and downloaded articles, so that authors can view both the usage activity and impact of their work. If you haven’t yet spent a few minutes drilling down into these pages, I suggest you do so. The data is fascinating and what you find may surprise you and your colleagues!