ScienceDirect downloads

I’ve just been looking at some stats from Elsevier’s ScienceDirect, and see that in 2008 there were 288,845 downloads of papers from Minerals Engineering. Yes, over TWO HUNDRED AND EIGHTY EIGHT THOUSAND, a truly staggering figure. In the same period, International Journal of Mineral Processing had 145,026 and Hydrometallurgy 243,390 downloads.

These figures show the enormous usage of these journals in industry and academia, and personally I rate downloads as a much more valuable indication of a journal’s worthiness than the often biased impact factor (see http://www.meionline.proboards2.com/index.cgi?board=general&action=display&thread=1 for a general discussion on impact factors).

In looking at these stats, I have to congratulate Kostas Komnitsas and Dimitra Zaharaki of Technical University of Crete, whose paper “Geopolymerisation: A review and prospects for the minerals industry” (Volume 20 Number 14) was the most downloaded Minerals Engineering article in the last quarter of 2008.