  |
Thanks to our users, authors, partners, and staff, we reached 25,000,000 all time downloads of full text papers from the SSRN eLibrary (http://ssrn.com/search) last week. This number was beyond our expectations when we started SSRN in 1994. We reached it through the hard work of a lot of people and are thankful to all of you. The eLibrary has grown to 214,000 documents and 105,000 authors during 2008. New submissions of papers now exceed 50,000 per year, which increased from a rate of 40,000 per year this past summer.
We are becoming a top destination for scholarly research: Each year SSRN is being referenced by more faculty web pages, blogs, and other web sites, and crawled with increased frequency by all the major search engines. As I said in June, SSRN download statistics do not count downloads from search engine bots (e.g., Google, Yahoo, and MSN), anonymous users, and multiple downloads from the same user or the same IP address. We project that reported 2008 SSRN downloads will be close to 7 million and total gross downloads from all sources for 2008 will be 14 million.
Many of you have written to us with valuable suggestions that helped shape our development plan. The SSRN team appreciates the many compliments on the new design of our abstract pages that include easier access to the citations to each paper (from other SSRN papers) produced by our CiteReader citation technology, and our new "People who downloaded this paper also downloaded ..." recommendation system.
In 2009, we will expand the number of Rankings to include those based on citations, and, with the help of Carl Bergstrom and Jevin West from the University of Washington, we will add an Eigenfactor measure of importance for papers, authors, and institutions. The Humanities Research Network will expand beyond the initial subject areas of Classics (CRN), English and American Literature (LIT), and Philosophy (PRN), and we will continue to work with other content providers, such as ProQuest, to get broader readership for papers in the SSRN eLibrary.
Our year-end distribution break is scheduled for Monday, 22 December 2008 through Sunday, 4 January 2009. During the break, SSRN's abstracting eJournals will not be distributed so that we can perform maintenance on our database and expand our subject areas. During this break period, we will continue to provide support for downloads, submissions, and subscriptions. For any requests during the break, please use our regular contact systems at UserSupport@SSRN.com or call toll free 877-SSRNHelp (877.777.6435). Outside of the United States, call 00+1+585+442-8170.
If I can be of assistance or if you have suggestions on how to improve SSRN, contact me at Gregg_Gordon@SSRN.com or use our "Feedback to SSRN" link on most SSRN web pages. Both myself and the entire SSRN staff enjoy stories about how SSRN has impacted your life. Please keep them coming.
Thank you again for helping us reach the 25,000,000 mark, and Happy Holidays to all of you and your families!
Gregg Gordon
President
Social Science Research Network