Overview

eResource usage guidance

Tips and guidance on how to best utilise eResource statistics and reports.

Find out about the terms used in usage statistics, the reports available to you, and how to determine the cost effectiveness of eResources.​

Key reports

Counting Online Usage of Networked Electronic Resource (COUNTER) reports are standard. Use them for reliable comparisons between electronic resources from different suppliers, if applicable.

COUNTER 5 Reports

See also COUNTER 5 for Librarians.

This introduces metrics grouped by:

  • investigations, when a user clicks on parts of a record, for example viewing the abstract, or fulltext
  • requests, which counts fulltext views or downloads

Searches have been sub-divided into regular, platform, federated and automated.

See the glossary for different types of investigation, request and search terms and definitions.

Platform, database, title and item reports are available and can now be filtered.

Supplier reports

For help see Elton B Stephens Company (EBSCO), ProQuest, British Medical Journal (BMJ), Ovid.

As well as the COUNTER reports, suppliers may offer reports which allow for customization or give more detail.

The data we use

NHS Knowledge and Library Hub

NHS England will monitor usage through the EBSCO standard usage reports, such as interface usage, login usage, link activity, and more. 

The interface usage and login usage reports will be used to report on volume of use and the link activity report will be used to report on the number of inter-library loans (ILL) requests.

ThirdIron will also report on full-text requests via LibKey and BrowZine web.

British Medical Journal (BMJ) best practice

Sessions and page impressions (website)/screen views (app).

The data we use

Supplier-provided COUNTER 5 regular and automated searches, and unique item investigations.

eJournals and eBooks

Supplier-provided COUNTER 5 unique item requests and unique title requests.

We aim to publish this data, suitably anonymised, in a dashboard to enable benchmarking by size of Trust.

INCDocs

INCDocs reports list request totals made by your organisation and requested from your organisations from other libraries.

Dashboards

NHS England provides e-resources usage statistics dashboards in Tableau for access by NHS Knowledge and Library Services (KLS) managers and staff responsible for electronic resources. The dashboards cover:

  • NHS Library and Knowledge Hub total requests
  • BMJ best practice page impressions
  • OpenAthens account totals and usage
  • LibKey total requests
  • Royal Marsden Manual total item requests

Request access to Tableau via the Service Desk. See also the Service Desk post on accessing and using Tableu's dashboard.

Page last reviewed: 12 January 2024
Next review due: 2 January 2025

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