How the papers page counts views and citations

Three sources, read live

The papers page reads view, download and citation counts from DataCite, OpenAlex and Zenodo. Each source gets 4 seconds to answer.

Fetches are cached for 6 hours. A visitor can see numbers up to 6 hours old, and the page says so under the table.

n/a is not zero

A source that is down, times out, or returns a body the page cannot parse shows n/a. The reason sits in the title attribute of the cell. A failure is never reported as zero.

A real answer of 0 shows 0. The n/a mark is reserved for a source that did not answer.

OpenAlex indexes new DOIs late, so a 404 is a normal answer. That source shows n/a with http 404, and the other two still count.

Totals use the largest source

The total row takes the largest single source for each metric. The sources count the same visits, so the page never adds them together.

If all sources are down, the total row is n/a everywhere and the page shows sources answering: 0 of 3. The places, the cite box and the software records still render.

Google Scholar

Google Scholar has no API. It appears as a link labelled view on google scholar. It is never a count and never part of sources answering.