Usage reports

COUNTER opens in new tab/window rolled out its new Code of Practice, Release 5 (COP5) in January 2019.

Comprised of libraries, publishers and vendors – including Elsevier, a founding member – COUNTER is a non-profit organization that develops standards for reporting on the usage of electronic resources.

These standards are continuously updated to reflect changes in the information landscape, with COP5 being the latest iteration. COP5 has been developed to improve the clarity, consistency, and comparability of usage reporting.

Technology and publisher platform innovation have immensely transformed researcher workflows since the last Code of Practice was published in 2012, which has led to a need for additional usage metrics to better measure online user behaviour:

1. Distributed Usage Logging (DUL) is a new CrossRef-facilitated standard that allows for reporting of usage on 3^rd party platforms (e.g. Mendeley, ReadCube).

2. Investigations measure content interactions beyond the full text (e.g. abstracts, videos, research data).

3. Unique Item Requests measure usage independent of the content format and user interface, replacing the current separate HTML and PDF metrics (i.e. an HTML and a pdf download of the same article in the same user session count as a single 

   Unique_Item_Request).

4. Unique Title Requests (Books only) provide a total count of unique requests for a given e-book title, regardless of how many ‘sections’ (e.g. pages, chapters or an entire e-book) the user downloaded during a session.

5. Access type attributes: standard journal reports will include a filter to identify usage of  “Controlled” content (content behind license / subscription) vs “Gold OA” content.

The metrics simplify comparisons between vendors and will be added to Elsevier’s wide ranging “basket of metrics” we provide to help you if you’re evaluating collections, or if you’re reporting upwards about the value the library provides. Visit the COUNTER website to learn more about these new metrics. opens in new tab/window

The COUNTER COP5 reports are on the free E-PIC service, to give our customers a more holistic view of their Elsevier content across products.

In the Usage reports documentation, you will find documentation about COUNTER Code of Practice 5 for each platform. In these documents, you will find the “Reports: COP4 vs COP5” section describing the differences between the different versions of the reports and what you need to use/select from COP5 to get COP4 data if available.

Example from ScienceDirect: ScienceDirect COUNTER and supplementary report descriptions and information opens in new tab/window.

COUNTER Code of Practice 5 provides additional metrics but some previous COP4 metrics have been retired. Visit the COUNTER website for a full comparison of the COP4 and COP5 reports opens in new tab/window.

Note that the results clicks COP4 metric has been deprecated and is not equivalent to total item investigations. For your convenience we have made the COP4 Record views metric available in COP5 master reports for Scopus and Engineering Village (custom metrics). Please be aware that COUNTER COP5 includes additional filtering e.g. robots and crawlers.

All the COUNTER  COP5 metrics that have an equivalent COUNTER COP4 metric are available for the last 4 years. The newly defined COUNTER COP5 metrics are available from January 2019 onwards.

COUNTER COP5 usage reports broken down per child account (department) are available through COUNTER COP5 for ScienceDirect since January 2023. This report is not available for the other products currently.

Scopus Usage and Engineering Village Usage widgets contain the ability to filter usage metrics per department.

Unfortunately not – there are 2 reasons for that:

1. COUNTER mandates that the new Release 5 metrics are reported with data from January 2019 going forward only.

2. We had to implement some changes in our data/tracking to enable us to calculate the new metrics. These changes cannot be applied retrospectively.

The same as before. A turnaway is registered when a user tries to access an article but has no access entitlement to the content. The user will be directed to the abstract of the article at that time.

Investigations measure any content interaction, including abstracts, abstract & references, metadata, videos, supplementary materials (e.g. research data), images.

Elsevier has developed new and innovative ways to provide value to researchers leveraging different content types and metadata beyond “flat PDFs” and the Investigations metric allows us to track and showcase that value. Note that an active user request needs to be present to record an Investigation, i.e. embedded content does not count unless user requests it.

No, the processing of the logs is handled in the same way for all users.

Separate consortium reports are not provided under COP5. Consortium managers are able to access any Release 5 report for their members and pull an overall report containing aggregate usage statistics for all members of their consortium. Consortia can also get COP5 reports with the breakdown per child account from E-PIC. To request administrator rights as a consortium or to identify your administrator(s) please follow the directions in the Admin Tool.

DUL (Distributed Usage Logging) is a new CrossRef-facilitated standard to report usage of DOI-identified content on 3rd party platforms such as aggregators, repositories and SCNs. Technology has facilitated more interactive ways of accessing content, sharing and collaborating on non-publisher platforms such as aggregators, repositories and SCNs. DUL enables a more complete representation of content value.

For detailed information and helpful guides on the COUNTER COP5 metrics and how you will benefit from even more transparent reporting, we encourage you to visit the COUNTER website. opens in new tab/window

You can find all the reports using the Engineering Village Usage widget in E-PIC. The widget provides:

• Overview (Citations, Literature discovery, total searches)

• Searches (breakdown by type)

• Searches by database combination (Top 10 database combination searches in the last 12 months)

• Literature discovery (abstract record views, detailed record views and outward links to documents)

You have the ability to filter the usage per department.

You can find all the reports using API Usage widget from E-PIC. This widget provides monthly usage per API for Scopus and ScienceDirect.

This report has been discontinued. Please contact your account manager if you need to get usage report by access route.

You can get monthly total Full Text Usage per Book Type using ScienceDirect Usage widget. Select Books in the first dropdown list and then “E-Books”, “Series”, “RefWorks” or “Handbooks” instead of “Total usage”.

The Book usage reports per Book Type and ISBN/ISSN are not available yet.

Please contact your account manager if you need to get COP5 usage reports for each book type.

Your Elsevier Account Manager and Customer Consultant are both always available to answer questions and give training and support for your reporting needs.