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The solutions to all our problems may be buried in PDFs that nobody reads:
What if someone had already figured out the answers to the world's most pressing policy problems, but those solutions were buried deep in a PDF, somewhere nobody will ever read them?
According to a recent report by the World Bank, that scenario is not so far-fetched. The bank is one of those high-minded organizations Washington is full of them that release hundreds, maybe thousands, of reports a year on policy issues big and small. Many of these reports are long and highly technical, and just about all of them get released to the world as a PDF report posted to the organization's Web site.
The World Bank recently decided to ask an important question: Is anyone actually reading these things? They dug into their Web site traffic data and came to the following conclusions: Nearly one-third of their PDF reports had never been downloaded, not even once. Another 40 percent of their reports had been downloaded fewer than 100 times. Only 13 percent had seen more than 250 downloads in their lifetimes. Since most World Bank reports have a stated objective of informing public debate or government policy, this seems like a pretty lousy track record.
The report can be found here. (PDF)
(Score: 5, Interesting) by frojack on Tuesday May 13 2014, @12:53AM
I agree, that not many will wade through some esoteric text without a reason to do so. And quite possibly the demand for the papers by the few qualified to actually understand them is filled by direct emailing or by some other distribution means.
The first thing you notice when reading the report (yeah, I'm THAT GUY) is that they are reporting Both CITATIONS (gleaned from Google Scholar) and actual Download counts from their servers.
HOWEVER, I wonder if these guys really know how to read a web server log.
To what extent did they discount Google (and other spiders) and focus only on those from user agents they saw as individual people?
I suspect this is EXACTLY what they did, because ZERO hits on papers that you can find on Google means someone is filtering the web log.
Most people find knowledge via search engines, and if your paper happens to trip some search request you may never know it if the search engine's snippet doesn't show what the user is looking for. (Personally, I also have a tendency not to fetch a pdf if the answers are available in simple html pages. But that's probably just me.)
Even if the search engine snippet does trigger your interest, and you use Chrome, the hit to the site will actually come from Google, (not your browser) as chrome will read in the PDF and present it as a web page for better functionality, and further Google will cache those so they don't have to hit your page again.
So by excluding Google crawlers, they have excluded a huge source of hits.
These reports are large, and take a large amount of time to produce. Just the writing would take days or weeks, let along the data collection. Yet they churn out on average one a day world wide.
They spend the first 12 pages telling us how focused and informative their reports are.
Still they complain about a small number of Citations to their work. And the complain about a small number of downloads of their work.
The inescapable conclusion is that they have a huge staff of corner-hummers churning out pap that nobody wants.
The Bank's net administrative budget for 2014 is set at $1,946.7 million USD. That's just for administration, nothing to do with the loans and bailouts the supply to countries in distress.
They are planning a 400 million dollar cut in staffing. Long overdue I suspect.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 13 2014, @10:40AM
Who cares how many times google or baidu has "downloaded" a paper? Search engine hits are only interesting to the extent that they drive actual people to read (or at least access) the paper. Sure, I suppose there might be a few people who, seeing a link in google go to the google cache rather than the actual link, but that's a pretty small minority.
These are detailed policy reports intended for political and policy wonks. They don't expect you to read them, but they do expect congressional and ministerial staffers to. They do expect that lobbyists will use their data to craft informed opinions. They do expect that NGOs will read them to understand and set priorities. They're called the "World Bank," but they're not really a bank in the normal sense - they're an economic development agency. Many of the reports they generate are (presumably) intended to support that mission, regardless of whether outsiders ever look at it. They certainly didn't expect tens or hundreds of thousands of hits, but Zero is shocking.
It should be shocking and disappointing to you that the people crafting policy in your country do so little research (or are so bad at research) that they never access this data set. You should interpret it as further evidence that the people crafting policy in your country are guessing, based primarily on their own biases, about not only how to solve the world's problems, but about what those problems are in the first place.
(Score: 2) by frojack on Tuesday May 13 2014, @05:33PM
Its equally possible that the World Bank's research is drawn from national sources, which makes it by definition, a second order derivative, and LATE. After all, national governments tend to have better and more current sources. Their research tends to be more focused.
So the part I find shocking is that they expect a repackaging of existing national reports to attract more hits than the original reports.
Secondly, its not JUST about the downloads. Their report laments the fact that their research isn't cited much in any other articles.
Again, this is probably because its just as easy to hit the in-country websites for Argentine steel production as it is to hit the World Bank site and get out of date figures third hand.
Then again, there is whole aspect of the World Bank being a UN organization, and all the political bias that brings with it.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.