Assessing a human mediated current awareness service

TL;DR

This study analyzes editor behavior in the NEP current awareness service over ten years, identifying key factors influencing report success and providing insights into editing patterns and user engagement.

Contribution

It offers a detailed analysis of editor behavior and success factors in a large-scale current awareness service, based on extensive historical data.

Findings

Average issue size of 12.4 papers

Average editing time of 14.5 minutes

Report success driven by topic, subscribers, and promotion

Abstract

In this paper, we present an approach for analyzing the behavior of editors in the large current awareness service "NEP: New Economics Papers". We processed data from more than 38,000 issues derived from 90 different NEP reports over the past ten years. The aim of our analysis was to gain an inside to the editor behaviour when creating an issue and to look for factors that influence the success of a report. In our study we looked at the following features: average editing time, the average number of papers in an issue and the editor effort measured on presorted issues as relative search length (RSL). We found an average issue size of 12.4 documents per issue. The average editing time is rather low with 14.5 minute. We get to the point that the success of a report is mainly driven by its topic and the number of subscribers, as well as proactive action by the editor to promote the report in her community.