[Eril-l] Westlaw stats

[Electronic Resources in Libraries discussion list]

[heart]         Mueth, Sarah reacted to your message:
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From: Eril-l <eril-l-bounces at lists.eril-l.org> on behalf of Electronic Resources in Libraries discussion list via Eril-l <eril-l at lists.eril-l.org>
Sent: Wednesday, September 3, 2025 1:04:26 PM
To: Electronic Resources in Libraries discussion list <eril-l at lists.eril-l.org>
Subject: Re: [Eril-l] Westlaw stats


[This email originated from outside of UNCW]

Hi Sarah,

For CPU calculations, we use a combination of the transaction counts for document display metrics.

That's based on what our Westlaw rep advised in 2022 when asked for the closest thing we could get to COUNTER's Total Item Requests.


The categories can be confusing when getting a report put together.  QuickView will account for most actions in Westlaw.  It won’t track someone clicking into a category, such as narrowing in from the home screen to Statutes and Court Rules, for example, but it will count most things people are doing.  Roughly speaking, the main categories are searches, document displays, and KeyCite.  It sounds like you’re looking for document displays only.  I would choose Report Format as Detail-Account.  It should give you a list of transactions for a given date range and then show the main breakdowns.  Something like this:

[cid:f7e430f6-06c1-4ead-941c-e2ac80f9dea1]

You can then just subtract the KeyCite and Searches from the number to get total document displays.  They’re unique, meaning a Newsroom Multi-Search Document Display has no overlap with Multi-Search Document Displays.  Generally speaking the difference between the two is where the document was accessed from (Newsroom being that content, while Multi-Search is in either the main search bar or a broader category (not news), such as “Statutes and Court Rules” or Secondary Sources.


There are a few more types of document displays that can show up in reports these days. I don't know what the difference is, and they almost never show up in my usage reports, but I have shamelessly stolen GALILEO's breakdown of the stats for my own reference. They have a public GitLab with scripts for loading usage data. Credit goes to Brad Baxter for this list (thanks Brad!):

        "MULTI-SEARCH KEYCITE" => "citation",
        "MULTI-SEARCH TRANSACTIONAL SEARCHES" => "search",
        "MULTI-SEARCH WN PR SEARCHES 3" => "search",
        "MULTI-SEARCH DOCUMENT DISPLAYS" => "fulltext",
        "NEWSROOM MULTI-SEARCH DOCUMENT DISPLAYS" => "fulltext",
        "MULTI-SEARCH WN PR REPORTS 03"  => "fulltext",
        "MULTI-SEARCH ONLINE IMAGES" => "fulltext",
        "MULTI-SEARCH WN DOC DISPLAY 20" => "fulltext",



Thanks,

Lynne



Lynne Jones

Electronic & Continuing Resources Librarian

University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee

jones873 at uwm.edu | (414) 251-6467

________________________________
From: Eril-l <eril-l-bounces at lists.eril-l.org> on behalf of Electronic Resources in Libraries discussion list via Eril-l <eril-l at lists.eril-l.org>
Sent: Tuesday, September 2, 2025 9:45 PM
To: eril-l (eril-l at lists.eril-l.org) <eril-l at lists.eril-l.org>
Subject: [Eril-l] Westlaw stats


Since there’s been discussion about Hein usage on this list, I’m curious to know how (if?) all of the Westlaw subscribers out there are able to use the data Westlaw provides in any meaningful way.



________________________________

Sarah Mueth, MSLIS

Serials & Electronic Resources Librarian | UNCW Library<http://library.uncw.edu/>

University of North Carolina Wilmington

910.962.2497

she/her/hers




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