What type of information does the APA PsycNET usage reporting service provide?
APA PsycNET usage reports provide data about all successful requests and access denials made from the IP addresses you provided to APA. The usage data is confined to content related pages including abstracts or summaries, database records, searches, multimedia, turnaways due to not having a subscription, and full-text downloads. APA PsycNET usage data is COUNTER compliant.
What is COUNTER?
Project COUNTER is an industry initiative that provides guidelines for the measurement, creation, and distribution of online usage reports to institutional subscribers (visit http://projectcounter.org for more information). The American Psychological Association (APA) is committed to providing COUNTER-compliant reports to our APA PsycNET subscribers to help ensure that your usage data for journals, e-books, databases and multimedia resources are reliable, consistent, and easily comparable across resources and platforms.
How are the COUNTER metrics “investigation” and “request” defined?
COUNTER (Release 5) contains several types of usage metrics, which break down into investigations and requests:
- Investigation – Any action a user performs within a set of search results that is related to a content item or title, including:
- Viewing an abstract, summary, or database record
- Using the Save, Print, Email, or Export command for search result items..
- Request – A view or download of the full-text of the content item.
Detailed information about these metrics are included in the COUNTER Friendly Guide to Release 5 for Librarians (PDF, 729K; Section 3, Counter Metrics, page 5).
What types of COUNTER reports are available from APA?
COUNTER reports are available for all databases and e-books licensed through the APA PsycNET platform – PsycINFO, PsycARTICLES, PsycBOOKS, PsycEXTRA, PsycTESTS, PsycTHERAPY, APA Books E-collections, and APA Handbooks.
Four (4) Master Reports (Platform, Database, Title, Item) provide the foundation for usage analysis and can be filtered and customized, while preconfigured COUNTER Standard Reports address common use cases. To help ease the transition to COUNTER 5, preconfigured COUNTER 4 (R4) reports are also available through the same portal; view our Available COUNTER Reports help page for more details.
To learn more about the structure of these reports and what they measure, visit the COUNTER web site:
- COUNTER Friendly Guide to Release 5 for Librarians
- COUNTER Code of Practice for Release 5
- COUNTER Release 5 FAQ
- Video Tutorials: COUNTER Foundation Classes
Are COUNTER reports available for consortia?
COUNTER 5 reporting does not contain consolidated consortium data. Consortia should use SUSHI to harvest individual reports for each member. (Note: Depending on the consortium’s setup, the admin may be able to view usage for individual institutional consortia members without using SUSHI.)
COUNTER 4 consolidated reports for consortia remain available for download. Consortia administrators can also view and download usage for individual institutional consortia members. Under your consolidated reports, you will find a drop-down list that contains each member of the consortia. To see reports for any given consortia member, locate the institution’s name on the drop-down menu and then select View Individual Institution Report. When viewing an individual institution’s reports, use the “Back to Consortium” button to return to the consortia reports.
If my institution has both PsycBOOKS and the APA Books e-Collections, will data be duplicated?
No. Data for document downloads are separate from data for database searches and sessions. Consequently, each chapter download is counted only once in the Book Requests (Excluding OA_Gold) standard report, regardless of which database contained the record the user found. Usage data for e-Collections is labeled as PsycBOOKS in the Platform Usage standard report.
What date ranges are available?
COUNTER 5 compliant data for investigations and requests on the APA PsycNET platform are available to institutions for usage beginning February 1, 2019.
COUNTER 4 compliant usage data are still available from the COUNTER 5 usage portal; use the COUNTER R4 menu in the left column of the dashboard.
What formats are available for downloading COUNTER 5 reports?
COUNTER 5 reports are available for download in the .CSV format. A Comma-Separated Values (CSV) file is a common spreadsheet file format that is compatible with many software programs, including Microsoft Excel.
When will the monthly usage reports become available?
APA usage statistics are typically released between the 15th and the 20th of each month.
How is usage activity assigned to an account?
Usage activity is assigned by IP address to the account that contains that IP address. Institutional administrators can check the IP range(s) associated with their APA PsycNET account by visiting the APA PsycNET Admin Center. If you need to update your institution’s IP range, please contact psycinfo@apa.org.
