WINTER 2012 - National Association of Schools of Public Affairs and ...

Patricia Shields, Nandhini Rangarajan, and Lewis Stewart
child protection might possibly be correlated with that event. One might argue
that Texas State University generates most of these downloads internally. This is
unlikely because only 3,032 downloads are recorded for Texas State University’s
domain (URL removed), accounting for under 2% of the total. Further, there
have been almost 20,000 downloads from 136 countries (as of November 30,
2009). Countries that most often download the ARPs are India (2,664), United
Kingdom (2,384), Canada (1,666), Australia (1,065), and Malaysia (937). In
addition, other domains generating significant MPA downloads include Google
Scholar, the U.S. Department of Justice, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
Given the public good value of these papers and their importance as a
way to promote the university and program, the MPA Program took steps to
enhance the overall download numbers. The faculty approached the Legislative
Reference Library of Texas (www.lrl.state.tx.us/genInfo/publicPolicy.cfm), which
was happy to post the Texas State Applied Research project sites to the library’s
website. The program also posted ARP references and links to the “For Further
Reading” sections of Wikipedia. These entries are added when time permits and
when there is a clearly related term in Wikipedia. About 20% of ARPs written
in the last 5 years have links to Wikipedia. In addition, there is now a critical
mass of papers that share topics or geographic location (water policy, succession
planning, job satisfaction, economic development, environmental policy, and
the Cities of San Marcos and Austin). To lead interested readers to these works,
students are encouraged to cite other ARPs that have a similar topic, method, or
geographic location.
This download activity generates a bonus. A wider audience uses student
papers. As shown in Table 3, these ARPs are cited in journal articles and policy
foundation reports and used by government agencies. Reports no longer trapped
in paper are making their way to a larger policy audience. They are now a
clear service to the world at large. We expect the high number of downloads to
continue given that they often show up on the first page of a Google search even
with a few simple keywords. Berkeley Press provides easy access to download data
for all papers. Hence it is possible to identify the factors that explain download
activity, which is the subject of this article. Berkeley Electronic Press (bepress 6 ),
Texas State University’s electronic file repository for final ARP reports, supplies
Texas State University’s MPA Applied Research Project usage data. Usage reports
from bepress transaction logs readily identify how often individual ARPs are
downloaded as full-text PDF files. This paper explores the factors that contribute
to Texas State University ARP downloads.
162 Journal of Public Affairs Education