This months Top 50 includes one of the oldest records in ORO at number 40.  The eprint number is 38 (we are now on eprint number 48065 and counting), which indicates it was one of the first to be added to the ORO eprints software.

The paper  Ekins, Paul; Simon, Sandrine; Deutsch, Lisa; Folke, Carl and De Groot, Rudolf (2003). A Framework for the practical application of the concepts of critical natural capital and strong sustainability. Ecological Economics, 44(2-3) pp. 165–185 was deposited over 10 years ago in ORO and according to the eprints software has had 3,762 downloads and 422 views.  Over half of those downloads have come direct from Google (or Google Scholar).  

The full text of the paper is also in ResearchGate which records 137 reads – although I’m not entirely sure when it was added to ResearchGate or exactly what a “Read” is!  It is also in Repec which is a subject repository for Economics – but there is no full text archived there. The full text is also in CORE and it looks like it was a pretty early addition to CORE if the url https://core.ac.uk/display/8 is anything to go by.

Downloads of the item in ORO have grown over the years in a not dissimilar pattern to how a paper accrues citations:

Citation data in Scopus indicate that this is a very highly cited paper, accruing over 240 citations, with a Field-Weighted Citation Impact of 4.34.  In terms of citations it appears to be in the top 2% of papers, based on its subject area, date and type of publication.  Citation pattern from Scopus is below:

I’m not attempting to make any correlation between downloads from ORO and citations from this single instance… I have made some exploratory analysis before.  It’s just rewarding that something archived in the infancy of the University repository is a highly cited paper, was originally made Open Access via ORO and remains a popular paper in terms of downloads today.

Top November downloads from ORO are below: