Usage patterns of scholarly articles on Web of Science: a study on Web of Science usage count

Usage data of scholarly articles provide a direct way to explore the usage preferences of users. Using the “Usage Count” provided by the Web of Science platform, we collect and analyze the usage data of five journals in the field of Information Science and Library Science, to investigate the usage patterns of scholarly articles on Web of Science. Our analysis finds that the distribution of usage fits a power law. And according to the time distribution of usage, researchers prefer to use more recent papers. As to those old papers, citations play an important role in determining the usage count. Highly cited old papers are more likely to be used even a long time after publication.