Geographical scientific publications in ORBi, the ULiège institutional repository: analysis of the socio-economic influencing factors of downloads

<p>Institutional repositories usage statistics, especially the number of views of references or downloads of documents and various associated data, constitute a wealth of information nowadays.</p><p>Our study aims to analyze different aspects of the downloads of scientific publications (journal articles and communications) in geography from ORBi, the institutional repository of the University of Liège, Belgium. We also verify in which proportion these downloads are influenced by some socio-economic factors of the “dowloading” countries.</p><p>We choose to work on a sample of 453 publications uploaded by the geographers from the ULiège(Belgium) Department of Geography in the institutional repository between 2000 et 2014.</p><p>In order to achieve our main objectives, we have first identified the language of the references and the number of downloads by country. We then performed statistical analysis, multivariate regression, to verify if socio-economic factors like, the size of the population, PIB, the internet access, etc., could influence the number of downloads depending on the language of the documents or the localization of the countries on different continents.</p><p>The results indicate that the language of the documents influences the number of downloads effectuated and their worldwide distribution.</p><p>On average 76% of the references downloads are explained by the characteristics of the countries that have effectuated these downloads, mainly the language, scientific production and population size of the countries.</p>