Top 500 Search Terms Used on the ICPSR Website, 2014-2015

The study evaluates several different means of measuring user demand for secondary data at a data repository by leveraging the web analytics. We collect data for this study using Google Analytics, focusing on the search behavior captured by the search box displayed throughout ICPSR’s website. On the ICPSR website, the search box allows visitors to search across the catalog of archived data (the largest number of searches), specific variables, and bibliographic citations, as well as general searches for ICPSR informational content. As a result, the search box capture users’ wide and varied interests. For this study, we export search results from the Google Analytics platform for two time periods: 2014 which includes searches from January 1, 2014 through December 31, 2014 and 2015 which includes searches from January 1, 2015 through December 31, 2015. We selected the 500 most frequently search terms for each of the two years. The 2014 data file includes the 500 most frequently searched terms in 2014 (out of 539,786 total searches). The 2015 data file includes the 500 most frequently searched terms in 2015 (out of 504,015 total searches). Information captured in these datasets encompass total unique searches, results pageviews/search, % search exits, % search refinements, time after search, and average search depth for each search term.