Facts reveal trends – Research Collection statistics 03/2020

The Research Collection statistics for the third quarter of 2020 make clear what we are all experiencing: things have become considerably quieter during the COVID-19 pandemic – and that quite literally. The authors of the article with the highest altmetric score over the last three months were able to demonstrate that, owing to our limited activities since this year’s spring, seismic noise below the earth’s surface has decreased.

Classics and the environment are trending

Yet this is the only category in our statistics in which the topic of COVID-19 takes first place. The doctoral thesis that was downloaded most frequently is once again Albert Einstein’s A New Determination of Molecular Dimensions from 1905. And the article with the most downloads focuses on the global carbon budget for 2019. The mots-downloaded data set relates to transport networks.

Knowledge within the global network: increasing proportion of open-access publications

A very pleasing development is that the proportion of open-access publications within the Research Collection has increased once more. The number of downloads has also grown compared to the same period last year. There were no changes in terms of the countries with the most downloads; however, there seems to be a greater global distribution of the downloads, as the total number among the top five has decreased slightly.

See the infographic for the third quarter of 2020 here

The Research Collection is the publication platform of ETH Zurich. University members can use it to publish academic full texts on an open-access basis, as well as to archive research data or to make these available to the public.