Slides for a talk on "What Does The Evidence Tell Us About Institutional Repositories?" given by Brian Kelly, UKOLN and Jenny Delasalle, University of Warwick Library at the ILI 2012 (#ILI2012) conference held at Olympia, London on 30-31 October 2012.

1. What Does The Evidence Tell Us
About Institutional Repositories?
Jenny Delasalle – Academic Support Manager (Research) in the Library at the
University of Warwick.
Blog: http://blogs.warwick.ac.uk/libresearch/ Twitter: @JennyDelasalle
Brian Kelly – UK Web Focus and ISC Community Engagement Manager at
UKOLN, University of Bath.
Blog: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/ Twitter: @briankelly /
@ukwebfocus
enhancing access to
Both interested in
research papers…
See also: Can LinkedIn and Academia.edu Enhance Access to Open Repositories?
Kelly, B. and Delasalle, J. Open Repositories 2012, 9-13 July 2012, Edinburgh, Scotland.
http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/papers/or12/paper-136/
JD > JD

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3. What we investigated…
Q Can LinkedIn and Academia.edu et al drive more
traffic to papers in repositories?
• We looked at researchers’ participation in “profile
sites”.
see: A Survey of Use of Researcher Profiling Services Across the 24 Russell Group
Universities http://wp.me/p25qL-2Qc
• Brian Kelly’s own papers & blog: traffic between them.
see: Where Do You Go To (My Lovely)? http://wp.me/p25qL-2Zd
• We looked at institutional repository visitor sources.
see: SEO Analysis of WRAP, the Warwick University Repository
http://wp.me/p25qL-3du
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4. Put your profile online: where?
• LinkedIn
• Facebook
• Mendeley
• ResearchGate
• Academia.edu
• ResearcherID
• University’s own pages
• Amazon author pages
• Claim your papers on Google Scholar
• Places to link to your articles from.
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5. Authors’ guidelines on publisher websites
• Taylor and Francis advise the use of LinkedIn and academic social
networking sites, mentioning MyNetResearch and Academici as
examples…
• Springer’s Author pages offer advice on using online tools and social
media. They mention Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn and ResearchGate,
Twitter and Wikipedia.
• Sage’s “Promote your article” lists YouTube, Slideshare, Flickr and other
Sage channels. Their section on “Help readers find your article” covers
Search Engine Optimisation.
• OUP's "Social Media Author Guidelines" cover blogs, Twitter, Facebook
and Youtube, and link to OUP channels. They also list LinkedIn, Goodreads,
flickr, tumblr and Quora.
• Emerald’s “How to Guides” for authors include some valuable advice on
disseminating your work: their “drawing attention to your book” is more
useful for social media advice, though.
• None of these author guidelines mention
5 repository deposit, however! JD > JD

6. Institutional repositories in the UK
• See MajesticSEO Analysis of these three at:
http://ukwebfocus.wordpress.com/
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7. Analysis of WRAP
• Background:
– No mandate for deposit, & highly mediated deposit
process
– content is often picked up on researcher’s behalf.
• Visitor nos.:
– just over 18,000 a month in 50 months (G Analytics)
– 730,304 downloads: 49.08% of which from Google or G
Scholar (IR Stats)
• Links from (SEO):
– our Business School (wbs.ac.uk) and the Bielefeld
Academic Search Engine(BASE)
– Some “top” addresses also feature in G Analytics data
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8. Using analysis of WRAP
• Links to same domain ignored
• Educational domains link to us?
• Which papers are the backlinks to?
1. A research paper on the impact of cotton in poor rural
households in India.
2. The WRAP homepage.
3. A PDF of an economics working paper on currency area
theory. (most downloaded paper in WRAP!)
4. A PDF of an economics working paper on happiness and
productivity.
5. The record for a PhD thesis on Women poets.
• Information to share with authors, to encourage
repository deposit? Or too fuzzy?
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9. Importance of Google
• Context:
• Between 50-80% of traffic to IRs are from Google (may be
higher if direct links to PDFs not recorded by Google
Analytics)
See: MajesticSEO Analysis of Russell Group University Repositories
http://wp.me/p25qL-315
• What provides ‘Google juice’:
• On-page SEO techniques
(structure, writing style, …)
• Links to pages, especially
from highly-ranking sites
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10. WHAT DELIVERS GOOGLE JUICE?
Survey of SEO ranking of 24 Russell
Group IRs carried out in August 2012.
Findings:
• Google, YouTube, Blogspot, Wikipe
dia and Microsoft are highest
ranking domains with links to IRs
• Blogspot.com & WordPress.com have
Blogspot.com significantly larger number of links to IRs
Wordpress.com
• Links from institutional domain (e.g. locally-
hosted blogs) provide little Google juice!
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11. UK Web
Focus blog
has a
rotating
Featured
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12. Most cited papers
according to Google
Scholar Citations
Downloads (IR)
Nos. Current Graph
275
169
244
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13. Reasons For Paper’s Popularity
Possible reasons
– Quality of paper
– Quality of metadata
– Importance of co-authors
– Provision of full-text,
rather than just metadata
– Formats used (HTML as well as PDFs)
– Role of social media
– Other suggestions?
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14. SEO or SMO
SEO:
Helping Google find your papers through:
• Writing style, document structure, …
• In-bound links
SMO:
Helping other people find your papers through:
• Viral marketing
• Engaging with one’s peers
• Sharing on social media services
SMO: Good for new papers, but not relevant for popular
papers written from 2004-8
SEO: Document structure consistent. Difference
BK >
appears to be significant nos. of in-bound links JD

15. Researchers can
• Look at metrics for their papers: which are most
downloaded and when.
• Investigate social media tools & communities to
promote their work.
• Learn which practices drive traffic and citations:
prioritise.
• Generate in-bound links to their papers: light
weight.
• Understand the networks where they can
participate: prioritise.
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16. We should use this evidence to:
• Advise researchers on:
– how to monitor attention for their work (impact
within and beyond academia)
– Key social media channels to trial for themselves
– Apply SEO tips to repositories
• Advise HE funders on how OA is & could be
working.
• Consider what we need to make repositories
successful: be open ourselves and share our
findings with each other.
– (As recommended by R. David Lankes in ILI 2012
Keynote!)
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17. Questions
Any questions or comments?
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