I’ve been writing on this blogs for years – since 2006. Since 2008 we’ve been tracking the page views (how often people read an article) and that it over 111,000 times.

Most articles get around 200-500 page views, some fewer and a handful many more.  Our recent critique of Cochrane has been viewed (at the time of writing) 3,068 times, it’s our second most viewed article (Using TRIP to help identify content suitable for resource poor settings has been viewed 5,483 times).

These figures seem high, but are they?  The technique I’ve come up with, to answer the question, is to compare the figures to individual articles in the BMJ.  Each BMJ article has a handy article metrics tab making this easy.  So, comparing to the Cochrane critique I found 5 articles published on either the 3rd or 4th April (the Cochrane critique was published on the 7th).

On average they are viewed 5,540 times – about 80% higher than our Cochrane article.  But, the Cochrane article had higher figures than 2 of the 5 BMJ articles, which impresses me.

In conclusion, I think our readership figures can be pretty good, even when compared to one of the world’s top medical journals.