How to read the OVID Database Use Reports
you are here: Home > About UT System Digital Library > Ovid Resources and News > statistics > How to read the OVID Database Use Reports
University of Texas at Austin
Digital Library Services Division
How to locate the report you need
Use reports for a particular OVID database will be found on the web server for that database subscription in the stats directory (eg. data for biosis will be found at http://biosis.lib.utsystem.edu/stats/). In this area, the statistical reports will be sorted into separate monthly folders (eg. 1_1999 will contain reports on January 1999 use). Each monthly folder will contain five text files per database subscription hosted on the server:
[database name]_web.txt
Ovid Web use.
[database name]_telnet.txt
Ovid Telnet use.
[database name]_java.txt
Ovid Java Client use.
[database name]_month.txt
Combined Ovid use. Small differences in the sum of web and
telnet use values versus the combined total represent Ovid Windows Client and
system administrator test use.
[database name]_ytd.txt
Year to date combined Ovid use.
What is in a use report
The reports are ASCII text files, not tab delimited. It may be possible in the future to provide tab delimited results which schools could then import into spreadsheet programs for later local analysis. Below is a sample which shows how the reports are formatted:
group: utexas
Statistics for all databases Total Average
Search Sessions 125 -
Session Length in Minutes 1690 13.52
Search Statements 554 4.432
Records Viewed 6432 51.456
Records Printed 736 5.888
Records Saved 30 0.24
Full Text Documents Viewed 0 0
Author Searches 0 0
Journal Name Searches 0 0
Title Searches 0 0
Subject Searches 0 0
Statistics for nursing Total Average
Search Sessions 125 -
Session Length in Minutes 1690 13.52
Search Statements 554 4.432
Records Viewed 6432 51.456
Records Printed 736 5.888
Records Saved 30 0.24
Full Text Documents Viewed 0 0
Author Searches 0 0
Journal Name Searches 0 0
Title Searches 0 0
Subject Searches 0 0
This is a section of the January 1998 report on CINAHL use for the University of Texas at Austin. The full report for January 1998 CINAHL use includes dozens of these tables, sorted by participating school under their nickname within the Ovid system. "utexas" is the nickname for UT-Austin.
Note that the sample consists of two tables, one for "all" databases and one for "nursing". The numbers in each table are identical. This is because the CINAHL database is loaded as one segment, nicknamed "nursing", which covers the years 1982 to the present. For some of the larger Ovid databases which include backfiles, such as MEDLINE, the report will consist of even more tables listing use by individual database year segments under each school. The database year segment use tables will be listed by their Ovid system nicknames. In those instances, the very first table under each school's nickname (the table listing numbers for "all" databases) will be a cumulative total for all use of all years of that database for that month by that school.
Records Viewed, Printed and Saved
The reader is reminded that the statistics on data capture (records saved and records printed) will remain persistently low by an unknown factor due to the variety of ways the user can print or save results other than by invoking the Ovid system "print" and "save" commands in a client/server environment.
Empty entries in the tables
Remaining lines in the report tables will always post "0". Our Ovid logs do not record information of this nature and the current release of Ovidstat was not programmed to omit these entries when empty. The future exception to this is "full text documents viewed". Beginning with November 1999 use data, it will be possible to track full text document usage within the Texshare Nursing Collection I and Nursing Collection II databases. Analysis of this data, and the form the use report will take, will not be available until late December 1999.
What it appears Ovidstat will never do
Tracking concurrent users and efficiently sampling use patterns by time of day over a given period (a month, a year) are not part of the current release of Ovidstat.
updated August 26, 2003