Summary
The databases listed in the following table were the most widely used in FY21 and FY22. Note that EBSCO databases (both UDiscover and EBSCO subject databases such as Academic Search Complete and SocINDEX) saw the highest number of searches by a wide margin. This in part has to do with our inability to track Google and Google Scholar searches. If that type of tracking was possible, it would be interesting to know whether or not our users search more in Google interfaces for scholarly content than they do in EBSCO; regardless, the margin represented in the chart below speaks to UD's heavy and sustained usage of EBSCO.
Breakdown of Popular Databases
*The above visual does not include every database/platform. Two factors determined inclusion: overall usage and COUNTER compliance. If a platform was not heavily used (for example, if it received less than 100 searches or 100 downloads in a FY, then it was not included. Likewise, if the usage was low and the platform does use COUNTER-compliant statistics, then it was also excluded). Some platforms with high search counts but are not COUNTER-compliant were still included.
Breakdown of Popular EBSCO Databases (Top 10)
| Database: | Searches: |
| UDiscover | 353,111 |
| Academic Search Complete | 48,159 |
| SocINDEX with Full Text | 25,756 |
| APA PsycInfo | 24,447 |
| Communication & Mass Media Complete | 20,303 |
| Political Science Complete | 16,996 |
| Business Source Complete | 13,865 |
| Criminal Justice Abstracts with Full Text | 12,963 |
| ERIC | 11,319 |
| EconLit | 11,142 |
| Sociological Collection | 10,057 |
Notes
For certain databases the ratio between investigations and total item requests is nearly 1:1. This likely indicates that the interface automatically displays the full text to the end user, and it can arguably be seen as an indicator of whether the number of downloads (total item requests) is inflated. All of the data visualized here is COUNTER 5.
