3 ms·

I don't think per capita is a good metric either. A better ratio would divide by number of researchers, college students, number of published papers, etc

• pessimizer 5y ago
  They're all good metrics, depending on what you're looking for. I'm not sure what calculating number of papers downloaded vs. quantity of institutional artifacts of education in a particular country would get you, other than a guess that it's inversely related to the ease of access to papers by a country's institutions i.e. an inverse to subscription numbers. Per capita is a bit messy, because it's tied up with internet access and wealth/educational inequality, but it also might be useful for that.
• neltnerb 5y ago
  Eh, I think it's good enough. People who aren't researchers or college students don't even have the option of a tedious authentication system with a library. I think it's more informative than total volume of articles, but that going further than that is the kind of overkill where you need twenty different numbers to capture all the different slightly different ways you can count the number of potential users. Should you do it versus number of universities? Number of students? Number of faculty? Number of graduates in the general population (who can't get papers otherwise but are qualified to read them)? Per capita has criticisms about different structural features of countries, but it's pretty hard to improve on without being super careful about how you interpret things. Same with per capita, of course, but at least people kind of understand it. I am not convinced that people really do, few people seem to even know what a median is or why it can be more useful than a mean.
• lopis 5y ago
  I'm not any kind of researcher or academic, but still like being able to read papers.