Well, it is the year of the pig!

Where are the bots that should be reading my publications thousands of times? More seriously, I also wondered who is reading dozens of times the answers I wrote to some questions asked in ResearchGate. Sounds unusual!

Papers on 'charismatic' and/or exotic mammals (e.g. bear in my case) seem to attract relatively more reads than citations. Secondly, reads (citations, wealth etc.) may increase exponentially rather linearly (you may check over the coming months whether this applies to your case). Thirdly, an institutional amplifier may be at work. One or several university courses may have included the reference to your paper into a lecture, exercise or case study. The later would be indicated by the majority of the reads originating from a single country or institution and showing strong fluctuations over their academic year.

Sure Hein, but subspecies of Sus scrofa in Iran??? It is a fun paper for sure, and has some nice photos but are there really 3,500 people in the world interested in this topic.

Erik, sometimes people also needs something "fun" that they are not expecting to read. So, Sus scrofa in Iran might an interesting topic to read.

Hi Freddy. You may well be right. The tiger on Borneo paper is fun, because it doesn't occur there. But still, thousands of readers who think that Sus scrofa subspecies in Iran is a fun topic?? I think it is, and I would love it if so many others did too. I just find it a little hard to believe and am trying to understand why. Maybe the Iranian government or a university made it part of their curriculum or so....

Well, it is the year of the pig!

It may well be because of the sudden interest in growing wild boar population in Iran from economic quarters and hunting parties . See https://ifpnews.com/exclusive/iran-issue-boar-hunting-permits-foreigners/

Maybe JP. I looked at the break down and of the 4666 reads of this paper on Iranian pigs, 4556 were by non-RG members, of which only 56 read the full text. I am also getting high interest from USA-based readers. So the interest in this paper could either be from American hunters who are interested in hunting Iranian wild boar (sounds unlikely), or the key word of Iran and generates interest for other reasons (political, global security etc.). All a bit curious for such an innocent taxonomic paper.

Thanks, Erik!. I will now add the key word "Iran" to my RG articles on pigsty-privies and wait for the miracle.

Good idea David. I am currently working on a new paper about "Determining orangutan population trends in Iran, Syria and North Korea" to test your hypothesis.

Hi.

I have a similar situation with one popular article on a particular site of Tenerife (Canary Islands), which has up to the moment 433 reads in RG but only one citation (self-citation). Sometimes there is "mystery" about why some popular items are more read than others which are of much more scientific interest.

Best regards.

I don't know Rubén. For months on end now my publication on Iranian pigs has been my most read. It is up to 6,018 reads in RG and the paper gets between 300 and 400 reads per week (1 citation in total). 5,894 of the 6,018 readers are non-RG members and 1% of those 5,894 actually read the text. The only country from which I get several hundreds reads per week is the United States, so I assume that at least some of the "readers" come from there. Whether it is somehow related to security issues or Iranian pigs are now part of the national curriculum, I don't know but I remain curious. I could indeed be that there is currently a major scientific or popular interest in pigs from Iran, but I somehow doubt it. Rubén Barone

Good question, Erik. My most read paper by far (~2300 reads) is an obscure paper in an Indonesian journal, written in Indonesian. I assume that because it is written in Indonesian, many Indonesians are reading it.

I have been working in several countries where native people don't really understand foreign language. This posed a real problem of scientific knowledge transfer on which I have been working on. So writing for example in Lingala, Swahili, in Pinging, in Bahasa will be a good way to bring knowledge to these national languages. This increasing interest is legitimate and current

Yes, from my experience in research communications this is by far most likely to be a bot problem. There are ways to control for this in some other analytics platforms, but I am not sure about RG. You are probably right to assume that there hasn't been a sudden scholarly spike in academic interest in Iranian boar populations, though there may be a sudden spike in political-bot 'interest' in trolling for paired keywords like "pig" and "Iran"... I can't wait to see the stats for your paper on Syrian and North Korean orangutan populations!

Thanks Laura Deal . The whole is a bit annoying. The paper still attracts a lot of interest now, has attracted nearly 7000 views, but certainly not because of the global interest in Iranian pigs. It bias the stats of overall research interest in my work, and I wonder what RG could do about this.

Good idea about a paper on Syrian or North Korean monkeys. I will sure it will be popular.

Pretty sure they are security agency bots trawling for communications on "Iran" given the recent political climate.

instead of writing in Tropical forestry... now there a high interest on CC and Natural ressource management in Iran and others marginal countries...writing on secret subject have been always curiosity. guys!! rush around these "inaccessible" countries.. there are opportunities.

Hi Erik Meijaard. I am in a similar situation as yours. I published only one article in my life till now, but I knew that it would have received some readings because the very new little discover I did in that specific field: a "anatomical" scientific basis for the existence of the Acupuncture Meridians. Nevertheless I did not imagine that in six years the article would have got more than 4,100 reads. Conclusion: symply you and me finally must humbly accept to be two greatest scientiiiiiiiiiists :-). Beside joking, All the Best and Greetings from Italy, launched by now towards a New Renaissance!