Here is what they have found, along with a graph from their post showing the impact of a Freakonomics blog post on frequency of a paper's downloads:
· Blogging about a paper causes a large increase in the number of abstract views and downloads in the same month: an average impact of an extra 70-95 abstract views in the case of Aid Watch and Blattman, 135 for Economix, 300 for Marginal Revolution, and 450-470 for Freakonomics and Krugman. [see regression table here]
· These increases are massive compared to the typical abstract views and downloads these papers get- one blog post in Freakonomics is equivalent to 3 years of abstract views! However, only a minority of readers click through – we estimate 1-2% of readers of the more popular blogs click on the links to view the abstracts, and 4% on a blog like Chris Blattman that likely has a more specialized (research-focused) readership.
· There is some spillover of reads into the next month (not everyone reads a blog post the day it is produced), and no evidence that abstract views and downloads lead blog posts.
1 comments:
I seriously doubt many readers ever follow the links and read cited papers. That's just based on the comments I see, most of which could have been cut and pasted from different topic threads.
Yes, I do try to read papers when the subject is of interest to me. Sometimes it's just to see the data. The truth is that if you haven't learned how to read scientific papers, you won't get a lot out of them, so there's not much sense for an English major interested in global warming or species extinction to read the primary literature. They'd get buried in detail even if they understood it, and they'd most likely take it at face value.
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