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3. Reports

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COUNTERMetrics edited this page May 1, 2024 · 1 revision

Required Reports

R5.1 includes four COUNTER Reports and several Standard Views of COUNTER Reports. At present, report providers with Host_Type=Repository have to deliver a Platform Report and its associated Standard View, as well as the Item Report described in the next section. The Platform Report is a very high-level summary view that is often used for management reporting (note that the PR includes search metrics, for which we have a separate section under the Attributes heading).

Questions for repositories

  1. As a repository manager, will delivering a Platform Report present difficulties for you or prevent you from using R5.1?

Mapping Item Reports to the Dataset Master Report

Of the four COUNTER Reports the Item Report (IR) is most closely related to the Dataset Master Report defined by the CRD, but it accommodates reporting on multiple content types and therefore includes a more comprehensive selection of metadata fields. R5.1 allows for metadata fields to be left empty where there is no metadata (e.g. ISBN for non-book items).

Fields which have are required in R5.1 but do not appear in the CRD:

  • Platform will be used to supply the repository name
  • ISBN, Print_ISSN and Online_ISSN are required in R5.1 but not applicable to research data. In this case, these column headings will remain required however fields for each dataset may remain blank

Fields from the CRD which appear in R5.1 with a different name:

  • Dataset_Title appears as Item
  • Creators appears as Authors
  • Dataset_Version appears as Article_Version
  • Other_ID appears as Proprietary_ID

There are also a series of parent and component data fields. Component fields are not mandatory, but are included in the Item Report specification. These can be excluded from Item Reports, or left blank if they are included in tabular reports. Requests for parent fields must be supported, but if there is no relevant parent information the fields may be left blank.

Questions for repositories

  1. As a repository manager, will including the extra R5.1 metadata field headings create difficulties for you in generating usage reports?

Questions for libraries and report consumers

  1. As a library or other consumer of usage data, will delivery of repository usage data in an IR format be helpful?

Components within the Item Report

An aspect of R5.1 that we feel may be particularly helpful for repositories is Components, which allow for nested files. To use the example of https://arcticdata.io/catalog/view/doi:10.18739/A2P55DH4M, we would recommend handling the whole dataset (DOI 10.18739/A2P55DH4M) as the Item, while each file (e.g. Heatmap_Family.png) would be a Component. Using this structure would allow repositories to report on usage of the dataset as a whole, or to be more granular and report usage of each Component.

Questions for repositories

  1. As a repository manager, would Components be a helpful mechanism for managing nested content?

Questions for libraries and report consumers

  1. As a librarian, is reporting on Components valuable to you?

Report headers

R5.1 Reports include an additional piece of information in the headers linking out to the COUNTER Registry. Repositories which do not appear in the Registry may leave the field blank. You can find out more about the Registry at https://registry.projectcounter.org/.

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