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Most Frequently Asked Questions About Elsevier Usage Reports Counts and What Doesn’t: An Insider’s Guide to Usage Reports
Answered by Sonja Lendi, Usage Research Manager, Elsevier Usage Research Department, Elsevier, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Q: Who can access customer usage reports provided by Elsevier?
A: Elsevier's customer usage reports are available to licensed institutes' designated account administrators. If you're affiliated with an institute licensed to ScienceDirect or Scopus and would like more information about Elsevier's customer usage reports, please speak with your library's designated account administrator or your Elsevier account manager or account development manager.

Q: I’m an administrator for my account but my ScienceDirect username does not give access to the usage reports. How do I get access?
A: The functionality that will enable you to log in to the usage reports with your ScienceDirect username is not in place yet. We hope to make this available in the second half of 2005. In the meantime, a separate username is required. This can be requested from your account development manager.

Q: Where can I find more information about the content of the usage reports?
A: Detailed information about usage reports including report descriptions and navigation guides is available on the ScienceDirect INFO site. See Quick Links section below for specific URLs.

Q: Which report shows backfile usage?
A: Backfile usage per journal title is shown in Report 1B: Number of Successful Full-Text Article Requests by Entitlement, Month and Journal. Open the report and select the entitlement "Publication years prior to 1995" from the drop-down menu box. [See page 11 for a screenshot of Report 1B.] If you are interested in total numbers (including book series and reference works), please refer to Report 3B: Document Usage per Entitlement.

Q: What does “Subject Package IDEAL” refer to?
A: When IDEAL journal titles were moved to the ScienceDirect platform, the quickest way to give former IDEAL customers access to all their IDEAL journals on ScienceDirect was to group these journals into a package and give the customers access to that package. The disadvantage of this approach is that now the usage for former IDEAL journals appears under the “Subject Collection” header.

Q: Where can I find the usage on reference works?
A: Usage for reference works is given in Report 1F: Number of Successful Requests for Full-Text Chapters by Month and Reference Work.

Q: I have licenses to a number of abstracting & indexing databases on ScienceDirect. Does Elsevier provide usage reports for these?
A: Yes, the official COUNTER-compliant report, Report 4B: Number of Searches and Sessions by Month and Database, provides the total searches and sessions for each of the databases to which you have a license. Databases hosted on ScienceDirect include EMBASE, EconLit, GEOBASE, MEDLINE and PsycINFO.

Q: I want to know how many users at our institute use ScienceDirect. Where can I find this information?
A: Report 2B: Users, IPs and Sessions, presents a graph and table showing the number of active users (based on user cookies), active IPs and sessions (based on session machine cookies) by month.

Q: Why can’t we distinguish actual subscribed titles versus what we access from a Unique Title List?
A: The usage system has no direct way of registering which titles are part of a UTL deal. This information is stored in the contract register, but there is no link between this system and the usage reports. Reporting on UTL usage will therefore be a manual exercise of matching data from the two systems. This exercise can be carried out by our Sales Support teams. A report can be requested through your account manager.

Q: Why is there no way to see how many personal profiles are registered on campus?
A: The registration of personal profiles is not registered in the log files, but is done in a different system. The usage reports do not report on data registered in that system. Thus they only show the number of personal profiles that were actually used.

Q: Why does it take so long to publish usage statistics?
A: There are advantages to being a big publisher, but there are also disadvantages. Being big means that the log files are also big and loading all that data takes time. For more information on how usage reports are generated, see the article on pages 10 and 11 of this pamphlet.