Choosing the right COUNTER report
10 March 2025Anyone who’s attended one of Tasha’s presentations in the last three years knows that she always recommends using the COUNTER Reports rather than the standard views. We built Release 5 from the ground up to be a powerful, flexible and comprehensive usage reporting framework. It replaced the more content-specific reports required in Release 4. To help report consumers (libraries) make the transition to Release 5, we designed a selection of standard views – pre-configured filters of the COUNTER Reports – that mimicked the old Release 4 reports.
The table below illustrates the limitations of standard views by comparing the comprehensive Title Report with the TR_J1 and TR_B1 standard views.
| Elements | Title Report | TR_J1 standard view | TR_B1 standard view |
|---|---|---|---|
| Data Type | Books | Books | |
| Conferences | |||
| Journals | Journals | ||
| Newspapers | |||
| Patents | |||
| Reference Works | Reference Works | ||
| Standards | |||
| Theses | |||
| Other | |||
| Unspecified | |||
| Access Type | Controlled | Controlled | Controlled |
| Open (OA) | |||
| Free to Read | |||
| Access Method | Regular (human) | Regular (human) | Regular (human) |
| TDM (machine) | |||
| Metrics | Total Item Investigations | ||
| Unique Item Investigations | |||
| Total Item Requests | Total Item Requests | Total Item Requests | |
| Unique Item Requests | Unique Item Requests | ||
| Unique Title Investigations | |||
| Unique Title Requests | Unique Title Requests | ||
| No License and Limit Exceeded denials |
The TR_J1 standard view is often a go-to for report consumers assessing journal usage, many of whom contact us asking where they can find Investigation metrics. Similarly, the TR_B1 is popular for assessing book usage, and many people ask where the Unique Item Request metric is in that view. In both cases, people ask us why open access materials are excluded. By using the TR instead of the limited standard views, report consumers would have all the information they require about journals and books of all Access Types – as well as other data types – in one place. Continued reliance on the limited standard views, by contrast, means report consumers (libraries) risk significantly undercounting the return on their investment in content.