To ensure you receive our e-mail, please add e-mail@ieee.org to your address book now.

UFFC-S Statistics/Metrics

John Vig
AdCom Member Emeritus, and UFFC-S President, 1998-1999

Throughout most of its existence, since 1953¹, the question of how the UFFC Society is doing was usually answered by citing the number of members the society had, the number of attendees at our conferences, the number of articles published in our Transactions, and the Society’s financial health.  Today, we have access to many more metrics.

At the May 2012 meeting of the UFFC-S Administrative Committee, John Vig presented some never before seen metrics, including statistics about the website, and downloads of transactions and conference articles. Below is his presentation.

The website is at http://www.ieee-uffc.org.  The website analytics provides a wealth of data, especially about visitors and downloads.  As can be seen in the next slide, of the 10,745 visits during April 2012, 6,921 were by unique visitors (and the rest were repeat visits).  As UFFC-S has only 2,200 members, it is clear that the visitors include many non-members.  The visitors viewed 31K pages during April. The average visit duration was ~ 3 minutes, but the duration of visits was less than 30 seconds for 79% of visitors.  The countries with the largest number of visitors are shown in the table in order of the number of visits.

 

The next slide shows the website’s most downloaded documents, and the number of times each was downloaded.  Five of the top nine are in the Learning Resources pages of the website,
Ultrasonics:  www.ieee-uffc.org/ultrasonics/teaching.asp
Ferroelectrics:  www.ieee-uffc.org/ferroelectrics/teaching.asp
Frequency Control:  www.ieee-uffc.org/frequency_control/teaching.asp

The Frequency Control Learning Resources pages contain the most materials, including many Review Papers, Tutorials, Books, and even a Ph.D. thesis (Art Ballato’s).

Other popular parts of the website are the history pages,
http://www.ieee-uffc.org/main/history.asp
On these pages, the history of UFFC-S, as well as the histories of a variety of topics in ultrasonics, ferroelectrics and frequency control may be found.  More than 20 articles may be found in the frequency control history section,
http://www.ieee-uffc.org/main/history.asp#frequency_control

Among the most downloaded history papers were Engineering time: inventing the electronic wristwatch, by Carlene Stephens and Maggie Dennis, and The History of Ceramic Filters, by Satoru Fujishima.

 

The next slide shows the annual downloads of papers from the Transactions on UFFC.  Note that in 2011, more than 225K articles were downloaded.  (There were nearly 100 million downloads from IEEE Xplore during 2011.  These included not only journal articles but also conference proceedings articles.  As an aside, IEEE Xplore contains the proceedings of well over 1,000 conferences.)

 

Interestingly, of the papers downloaded, only 29% were 2011 and 2010 papers, as shown in the next slide.  T-UFFC papers continue to be downloaded for many years after publication.  For example, papers published 10 years ago were downloaded 6,463 times and papers published 20 years ago were downloaded 3,599 times.

 

A useful feature on the T-UFFC page in IEEE Xplore, http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/RecentIssue.jsp?punumber=58,  is the “View Popular.”  By clicking on this button – see next slide - one may view the list of 25 most downloaded papers during the previous month.  The screen shots in the following two slides were taken in April 2012 when the View Popular showed the list of 25 most downloaded papers during March 2012.  The list is updated once a month, around mid-month.

 

The next four slides show the 25 most downloaded papers during March.  The first of the four shows, once again, that old papers are still popular.  The number 1 most downloaded paper was a 2007 paper, and the 5th most downloaded was a 1990 paper!

 

As discussed in reference 1, a predecessor of the T-UFFC was the Transactions on Sonics and Ultrasonics, and a predecessor of that was the Transactions of the Professional Group on Ultrasonic Engineering.  The next two slides show that, for example, during 2011, the most downloaded paper from the T-Sonics and Ultrasonics was a 1983 paper, and this paper was downloaded 314 times.  Even a 1974 paper was downloaded 177 times.  The three numbers following the titles are the volume and issue numbers and the number of downloads.

 

From the Transactions of the Professional Group on Ultrasonic Engineering, the most downloaded paper during 2011 was a 1958 paper, and this paper was downloaded 79 times.  Even a 1954 paper was downloaded 23 times.

 

Our conference proceedings papers were also downloaded a large number of times during 2011, as shown in the next three slides.  Among these papers too, there were many downloads of old articles.  For example, for each of our three proceedings, there were more than 1,000 downloads of 1988 papers.

 

Finally, UFFC-S membership has been remarkably stable for many years.  As mentioned in reference 1, UFFC-S had 2,200 members in 1997.  The next and last slide shows that, between 2007 and 2011, the membership numbers have been 2,258 ± 36.  One wise-guy quipped, “It must be the quartz!”

 

Reference

1)  FROM PGUE TO G-SU TO UFFC-S, 1953-1997: A HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE, http://www.ieee-uffc.org/main/history.asp?file=hickernell

 

back to Home Page