Celebrating ten years

The title of this editorial is slightly misleading as nothing much in the nature of celebration has occurred since the journal moved into its 11th volume, but we did not want to let this anniversary pass without any reflection. We thought it about time to look at its progress in terms of online circulation, since Simon Anholt successfully launched the journal in November 2004. Unfortunately, Palgrave has only been collecting webstats since 2009, so we’ll share with you some insights into the journal’s online usage for the last 5 years.

The following metrics are reported:

Visit – An interaction a unique visitor has with the Website over a specified period of time or activity. Consequently, it is a series of page views, beginning when a visitor’s browser requests the first page from the server and ending when the visitor leaves the site or remains idle beyond the idle-time limit.

Page Views – Views or page views are generally defined as a request to load a single page of a Website.

Article Views – A request to view an article page – we cannot distinguish between successful and non successful requests, that is, this figure is the total number of attempts to access an article (also by non-subscribers).

Figure 1 shows the trend line of Website visits, page views and article views for the period 2010–2014. It clearly reflects the growing success of the journal, doubling the visits and page views and quadrupling the article views over a period of 5 years. This means that increasingly people are able to find us and know what they are looking for (that is, more article views per visit on average). Figure 2 shows the proportion of visits per country over the 2009–2014 period, which reflects quite a nice geographical spread of readership.

Figure 1

Five year trend lines of visits and views.

Figure 2

Percentage of visits per country 2009–2014.

Table 1 shows the 50 papers that generated most article views between 2010 and 2014, representing 57 per cent (138 575) of all (242 681) article views. For a fair comparison, papers are categorised as open access or paid articles and then ranked according to the average quarterly views the paper generated since publication (that is, total article views 2010–2014 divided by number of issues published since publication of the article). In both rankings, the highest ranked papers (Dos Santos and Campo, 2014 and Zenker, 2014) have been given a somewhat unfair advantage as usually the number of article views peaks in the first year of publication and hence, the quantity of average quarterly views is relatively high for these recent papers, compared with older papers for which the initial high volume of views is averaged out in the quarterly stats across multiple years. Nevertheless, needless to say, Dos Santos and Campo (2014) and Zenker (2014) are some of the best performing papers of 2014. Lastly, what is also noteworthy is that Nuttavuthisit’s 2007 paper ‘Branding Thailand: Correcting the negative image of sex tourism’ continues to perform well. Hence, in conclusion, it seems that in place branding and public diplomacy, as in so much in life, sex sells.

Table 1 Fifty papers with most article views since 2010, ranked based on average quarterly views since publication (total article views 2010–2014 divided by number of issues since publication)