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The study by Phil Davis Consulting looked at the number of article downloads from academic and professional journals in the sciences, social sciences and humanities.

It then measured the usage ¡°half-life¡±, a term that describes the time it takes for a piece of work to reach half of its total number of downloads, for papers in 10 disciplines.

Almost 17 per cent of the articles had a half-life of more than six years and only 3 per cent had half-lives below 12 months.

Typically, journal articles in the humanities, physics and mathematics had the longest half-lives, with a median of four to five years. Papers in the health sciences had the shortest half-lives, at two to three years.

The study, published in November, gave median half-lives as a range to standardise the data?across different publishers.

Source: ¡°Journal Usage Half-Life¡± by Philip M. Davis. * The median age of articles downloaded from a publisher¡¯s website

holly.else@tsleducation.com