Who is pirating medical literature? A bibliometric review of 28 million Sci-Hub downloads - The Lancet Global Health
peter.suber's bookmarks 2018-12-21
Summary:
"The use of illegal online “shadow libraries” such as Sci-Hub has also emerged as a means of accessing scientific literature.4 An analysis of requests to the site logged from September 2015 to January 2016 revealed that Sci-Hub had successfully satisfied 99·3% of queries....
We aimed to define the proportion of downloads on Sci-Hub that are medical in nature and to consider these data at the national level, evaluating the relation between density of medical literature downloads and scientific output, national income classifications, and indicators of internet penetrance....
Of 27·8 million download queries, 23·2 million were requests for journal articles. We categorised 94% of requests using Scopus terms. 4·7 million requests (22%) were for medical journal articles....
Most queries for medical literature originated in LMICs (3·3 million, 69%). Almost half (2·2 million, 47%) originated in upper-middle income countries....
Nearly 1 million articles published by medical journals are downloaded on Sci-Hub each month...."