All entries for Friday 13 January 2023

January 13, 2023

Top of the Articles: Exchanges’ Most Downloaded Articles 2022

Writing about web page https://exchanges.warwick.ac.uk/

In a companion piece to yesterday's post, the EIC takes a look at which articles proved the most regularly consulted by the readership in 2022.

Yesterday I focussed on the most popular episodes of the Exchanges Discourse podcast. Today I’m turning to the journal itself and asking the question: What were the most popular articles in 2022? Naturally, there are a variety of metrics that we could use here but I’ll be deploying the one with the most readily available data to me: raw downloads. [1]

For interest, here’s the 2021 chart.

We published a grand total of 28 new articles in 2022, but as always this new chart isn’t limited to these pieces alone. Although, it might be natural to assume that there will be a strong representation from the new material given its prominence in social media post issue launch, previous years have shown a lot of articles on Exchanges go on being actively accessed year after year. Indeed glancing at the stats for 2022, even the least accessed article had 36 downloads which is no small feat! [2]

This year in keeping with the podcast chart, I’ve also given a reader share figure. This is to give an idea of the proportion of downloads each article enjoyed in comparison to every piece we’ve ever published since 2013.

Without any more delay then, here’s this year’s chart:

	Article	Reader Share	2021 Position	Issue	Year	Type
1	Tokens, Writing and (Ac)counting: A Conversation with Denise Schmandt-Besserat and Bill Maurer	7.6%	New Entry	5(1)	2017	Con
2	From the Advent of Multiculturalism to the Elision of Race: The Representation of Race Relations in Disney Animated Features (1995-2009)	6.1%	#1	2(1)	2014	CF
3	'A kiss is the beginning of cannibalism'	2.2%	#3	7(2)	2020	Art
4	Gamestop	1.8%	#2	8(3)	2021	CF
5	Challenges that Early Career Researchers Face in Academic Research and Publishing	1.5%	New Entry	9(1)	2021	Art
6	The Social Stigma and the Challenges of Raising a Child with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) in Greece	1.5%	New Entry	6(2)	2019	Art
7	Reflecting on the Experience of Environmental Epiphany in the Lives of Aldo Leopold, Thomas Hill Jr., and Albert Schweitzer	1.3%	New Entry	9(2)	2022	CF
8	Critical Analysis of the Electric Vehicle Industry	1.3%	New Entry	10(1)	2022	Art
9	Interrogating Practices of Gender, Religion and Nationalism in the Representation of Muslim Women in Bollywood: Contexts of Change, Sites of Continuity	1.1%	#7	2(2)	2015	Art
10	Myths of Male Same-Sex Love in the Art of the Italian Renaissance	1.0%	#6	3(1)	2015	Art

Key: Art – Article, Con – Conversation, CF – Critical Reflection

As always, I’m delighted, if a little surprised, how a number of our older articles continue to maintain a strong grip on our audience, especially given the strong reader share of the top two items. That said items from the last three years are still strongly represented with five entries – two of which were only published in 2022 - making very commendable appearances here.

It’s also good to see both conversation and critical reflection articles appearing high in the chart. [3] We continue to receive a number of excellent pieces in these formats, if perhaps fewer of the conversations than I would like, and hence it is satisfying to see our readers continue to value them, at least extrapolating from this data. [4] There are two a good range of new entries and checking back to when I first started reviewing the downloads in 2019’s volumes they are all genuine first-time appearances at the top of the charts – well done those authors especially.

As always, I suspect some of these articles will appear in our 2023 chart. However, with a currently scheduled 5 new issues to appear this year it wouldn’t surprise me if there was more than a little more competition than ever from new pieces twelve months from now!

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Endnotes

[1] Bibliometric fans and scholars might want to adopt a different method, drawing on impact, half-life, citations or altmetrics, but with the limited time available to me I’m going down the easiest route.

[2] It was an editorial from 2016, should you be curious.

[3] The most popular editorial(one of mine) popped up at number 45 in the chart (out of 231 total entries). Surprisingly high, although it was in one of our largest issues in terms of articles. Personally, I’m happy anyone reads the editorials - as editor, one has to accept that your own prose is always going to be of lesser import than featured authors!

[4] I often mention how critical reflections especially are valued by our readership and it’s good to see the numbers back me up!