Item Master Reports have been a COUNTER (www.projectcounter.org) approved industry standard report since the release of COUNTER 5. Whilst not mandatory for all publishers, over two thirds of SiQ customers provide these reports at the Item Level. How might these drive better insights and analytics?

The Item Master Reports are the most granular of any COUNTER report.  They provide the largest number of component parts – varying from Item to Platform and Author to YOP. With the flexibility of SiQ’s librarian reporting service and the COUNTER 5 standards, these now allow both librarians and publishers to dive even deeper into understanding usage with trusted data.

It is currently possible for users to pivot their reporting to gather COUNTER data from any of the available criteria and mix this with other dimensions. For example, a user can identify which articles from a particular author are generating most investigations or requests from a particular institution. At SiQ, we are increasingly looking at this event-based level of data. The compliance of COUNTER audits at the Item Level supports our trust and confidence in this increased granularity.

So, are Item Level Reports the future of usage reporting and analytics? Trusted metrics at Item Level, along with the flexibility of reporting that is required by the COUNTER standard, mean that far more questions can be answered by these reports. By structuring these questions around the Item itself, rather than the Title, we can better construct the reports we need. Another example: if our enquiry is around the use of OA we may have titles that have a mix of OA and Controlled Access content.

With only Title Level reports, we could not properly separate out content at the article level. With the Item Master Reports we can.

We are also considering other dimensions or parameters to associate at Item Level to provide further reporting insights. We are not limited by the components listed by COUNTER but with the Item id we may append other fields such as subject or source institution. The SiQ platform supports the addition of many additional attributes to enhance reporting and analytics and we welcome the opportunity to discuss this further with you. If this is of interest, please contact stuart.maxwell@scholarlyiq.com.

About Scholarly iQ
Scholarly iQ provides independent, trusted eBusiness solutions to the academic publishing market. Leaders in usage reporting since 2002, SiQ services integrate and deliver meaningful data accurately and on time for better business decisions.

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