Publish Zotero usage statistics

Gurdas_Sandhu

Can the Zotero website publish some key Zotero usage data, such as:

1. How many users (worldwide and by country, and maybe even a list of top institutions)?
2. Frequency distribution of number of items in My Library
3. How many groups and how many members use groups?

And so on. These would help get a sense of Zotero's widespread usage and in turn help new users considering Zotero.

adamsmith

Sean had some very skeptical notes about this 7 years back:
http://quintessenceofham.org/2011/05/21/on-usage-figures/

Gurdas_Sandhu

@adamsmith I agree with some of that (and I anticipated this will come up). Still, there is significant usefulness to having these numbers. Maybe provide a variety of data so interested people can make their own decisions. Also, additional benefit when data are presented as time-series and not snapshot. Sean's post speaks for itself. The numbers he mentioned (below) give a sense of where Zotero is (lower bound - upper bound):

May 2011:
"four million downloads"
"620,000 user account registrations"
"275,000 instances of Zotero ran today"

enozkan

I wouldn't mind seeing some numbers, and advertising them to my colleagues and students. Most of them are unaware of the fact that alternatives to EndNote, and now Mendeley, exist, and it feels like Zotero is falling behind in natural sciences. As a long-time user of Zotero, this puts me in an uncomfortable situation, where I can't even convince my own students to use Zotero (instead of Mendeley) and hence I can't share libraries. Not fun when co-writing manuscripts! (Indeed, I have never had a reason to create a shared library, because there was never a need. Very sad.)

Seeing the actual prevalence of Zotero in some sort of (admittedly inappropriate) metric might help overcome new user anxiety. I see that the developers are already helping us a great deal by trying to keep the import/export utilities to EndNote and Mendeley open. Very much appreciated!

To this effect, I had saved a screenshot from the results of a survey from a major publisher in natural sciences three years ago: https://www.dropbox.com/s/2vfkwuaw8yamnvw/Reference Manager Use 2015-08-18.png?dl=0

Very limited numbers, I agree, but it gave some sense of the state of affairs as of 2015. So, I was using this to tell my colleagues that Zotero is a good option used by many others.

So, while putting out bad statistics and software evangelism may indeed appear sleazy, low usage negatively and greatly effects current user experience due to lack of collaborators on the Zotero platform. Putting out some numbers may help.