In some cases, one title may appear more than once in a Title Report. If that happens, to get an overview of the total usage of this title, it’s necessary to add the values from the respective rows.
Duplicated rows are usually caused by one of the reasons listed below:
Metadata changes
Metadata for eBooks, journals, and other content may change. COUNTER reports are always generated with the most recent set of metadata for each item and COUNTER data is never changed after it has been generated. Therefore, an item or a title (a book, journal, article, etc.) may have different metadata for different reporting periods.
Example:
Year of publication for a book is changed from 2018 to 2019 on 1 November 2019. The book has been available online since 1 October 2019.
If you download separate monthly reports for October 2019 and November 2019 the reports will have different ISBNs for the book.
If you download one report for the period October 2019 and November 2019, that report will contain double lines for the book – one set of lines with counts for October 2019, and another set of lines for November 2019.
To aggregate usage figures for the same title, we recommend using Proprietary_ID as the primary identifier.
"Access_Type” changes
With the introduction of the new definition of “Free_To_Read,” it’s possible that a title is “Controlled” at one point in time, and then “Free_To_Read” (or the other way around). If the attribute “Access_Type” is in the report, the usage will be presented split between “Controlled” and “Free_To_Read.” If it’s a hybrid journal, it might be “Controlled,” “Free_To_Read,” and “Open.” If the attribute “Access_Type” is not presented (e.g., default Title Report), the usage will be aggregated.
Example:
Title Report
Title Report with the attribute “Access_Type” requested
To learn more about the Free_To_Read type of access, visit Impact of the Free_To_Read access type on usage figures.
Same journals being hosted on more than one platform
Duplicated rows might also be caused by the fact that some journals are available on more than one platform. For example, certain nature.com articles are now also hosted on Springer Nature Link.
In this case, if you choose to get a report for “All Platforms,” you might see certain journals appear more than once in the report. For more information on how to make sure that the usage is aggregated, please see the article Usage for a journal across multiple platforms.