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

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.