3 ms·

I don't think the methodology is necessarily colored by my view of science. My assumption is that most of scientific paper downloads are done by people who are

I don't think the methodology is necessarily colored by my view of science. My assumption is that most of scientific paper downloads are done by people who are employed to do it. Granted, it's a flawed assumption and there are no metrics on "how many papers are downloaded by which demographics", so we don't really have enough information to make a strong conclusion, but the right answer is probably somewhere in between.

wongarsu 5y ago
> the right answer is probably somewhere in between. Almost certainly. All the views I listed are valid in their own right, and their proportion probably shifts depending on discipline. Anecdotally papers around health, well-being or fitness seem to reach an audience of people looking for self-improvement, meanwhile machine learning papers seem to be read by people on or for their job a lot. Some other disciplines meanwhile don't seem to reach a notable audience apart from themselves. Which is fine in it's own right. I would actually love to see statistics on this, but I don't think anyone is in a position to provide them.
xiphias2 5y ago
People I know who work in universities have access to lots of papers for free. For us mere mortals who need to survive (which these papers definitely help), we need to use sci-hub, as the per article fees are huge.
- eldaisfish 5y ago
  for what it's worth, if you know the author's names, it's easy to find their email addresses online. Most authors would gladly send you a copy of their paper for free.
  - pessimizer 5y ago
    On sci-hub you can skim 20 papers in an hour to find the 3 that are relevant. That's weeks of work of emailing for preprints.
- doliveira 5y ago
  Even then, there can be quite a lot of bureaucracy. At the beginning of my Master's degree (Brazil) I had automatic and frictionless access to papers through the University network, then they started requiring access through some weird government website. I just went to Sci-Hub, much easier.

wongarsu 5y ago

> the right answer is probably somewhere in between. Almost certainly. All the views I listed are valid in their own right, and their proportion probably shifts depending on discipline. Anecdotally papers around health, well-being or fitness seem to reach an audience of people looking for self-improvement, meanwhile machine learning papers seem to be read by people on or for their job a lot. Some other disciplines meanwhile don't seem to reach a notable audience apart from themselves. Which is fine in it's own right. I would actually love to see statistics on this, but I don't think anyone is in a position to provide them.

xiphias2 5y ago

People I know who work in universities have access to lots of papers for free. For us mere mortals who need to survive (which these papers definitely help), we need to use sci-hub, as the per article fees are huge.

eldaisfish 5y ago
for what it's worth, if you know the author's names, it's easy to find their email addresses online. Most authors would gladly send you a copy of their paper for free.
- pessimizer 5y ago
  On sci-hub you can skim 20 papers in an hour to find the 3 that are relevant. That's weeks of work of emailing for preprints.
doliveira 5y ago
Even then, there can be quite a lot of bureaucracy. At the beginning of my Master's degree (Brazil) I had automatic and frictionless access to papers through the University network, then they started requiring access through some weird government website. I just went to Sci-Hub, much easier.