Grief Matters readership news

The Australian Centre for Grief and Bereavement recently received a visit from the Editorial team of RMIT's Informit. Informit is a full-text academic database. In 2009, Informit started hosting full-text access of all issues of Grief Matters.

For the first time, we've been given access to the Informit readership data of Grief Matters - and it's astounding.

We had assumed our online readership was small and based mainly through print delivery to members and subscribers. As it turns out, Grief Matters is incredibly well read on Informit. Of the 700 journals on their database, Grief Matters ranks #30 on the list of most-downloaded journals.

This calendar year to 30 June, Informit users downloaded a total of 4,920 Grief Matters articles, accessing 306 unique documents. This is incredible, as was explained by RMIT, as most of those 700 journals receive 10 downloads in a whole year. And this amazing readership is growing substantially - note this 4,920 total is only for the first six months of 2012. In this time, Grief Matters has around 500 more downloads than the whole of last year and more than double the previous year's total.

What's more, it looks like the articles people are reading are from across the board - old and new articles, all kinds of themes and from high profile authors and unknowns. Even the book reviews and editorials are getting a good read. In the time since we've gained access to the statistics, downloads have even jumped by 400 - it's fascinating to watch the numbers climb and to see what people are reading.

Access to this data changes the way we look at our readership and the reach of Grief Matters. It also opens up all kinds of opportunities and new ways of thinking about what we publish, when we publish and how we publish.

Further information

Readership to Grief Matters is growing. Click here for more information about academic database access to Grief Matters.