LibGuides: COUNTER 5: Home

COUNTER 5 at ProQuest

The purpose of this LibGuide is for ProQuest customers to have a specific place to have their COUNTER questions addressed regarding the various platforms at ProQuest as well as to provide a general understanding of COUNTER and its various nuances.

To that end, users of this guide will be able to

retrieve ProQuest COUNTER 5 reports in available platforms
make sense of COUNTER reports in various media and metrics
discover information in COUNTER reports that supports purchasing decisions, faculty involvement, and user behavior
identify relevant portions of the COUNTER Code of Practice
access support resources

COUNTER 5 is available for the ProQuest, Alexander Street and Ebook Central platforms. COUNTER 5 reports are not yet included for Congressional products but COUNTER 4 and proprietary ProQuest reports remain available.

COUNTER 4 and COUNTER 5 Comparison

A requirement of the COUNTER Code of Practice is that content providers offer libraries access to the current year PLUS the prior 24 months of usage (or from the date the provider first became compliant, whichever is later)

Code of Practice Key Points

The COUNTER 5 Code of Practice is a complex document with multiple audiences (librarians, providers, etc). Here are some key points for the Electronic Resource Librarian or those retrieving COUNTER 5 reports.

The Code of Practice helps ensure librarians have access to CONSISTENT, COMPARABLE AND CREDIBLE usage reporting for their online scholarly information. See Section 1.1.2 for the Scope of the Code of Practice.

Section 1.2.4 contains the new elements and attributes that were introduced in COUNTER 5
Section 4.0 defines the specific reports including Report_ID, Report_Name, Details and Host_Types
Section 5.1 specifies that separate consortium reports are not provided under R5 and gives additional detail.
Section 7 has some particularly useful information regarding processing rules for report data
- Double-clicking and what it measures or doesn't (Section 7.2)
- Counting of unique items (Section 7.3)
- Counting of unique titles (Section 7.4)
- When something is in more than one database (Section 7.5)
- Information on federated searches (Section 7.6)
Appendix B illustrates changes from previous releases

Searching the Code: to make finding what you need in the Code of Practice easy, use the Search the Code of Practice box. For example, a search for SUSHI gives approximately 10 results: