Why are statistics disaggregated by the year of submission?

[osborne]

There must be a reason why the statistics are given separately for each calendar year, according to the date of submission of the paper ... but it seems to me to be unhelpful and possibly misleading. Unhelpful because to see the % of papers accepted by my conference I have to go to each year separately, look at the number submitted in that year and the number accepted, and then do the math myself. Possibly misleading because
2008: papers published: 5
means not that 5 papers were published in 2008, but that of the papers published in 2009, 5 were submitted in 2008. (I've changed my system to report the total for each conference, not disaggregated by year, so unless someone else would like a change, this is not a request for a change in the standard system.)

[jmacgreg]

Hi Martin,

Are you primarily concerned with the scheduled conference statistics at the top of the stats & reports page (which are able to be viewed online as well), or the report functionality? Since the reports are maintained as plugins, it should be (relatively) easy to tweak them according to personal needs, or even create new ones. The statistics stuff at top, however, was ported directly from OJS 2 I believe, and perhaps could be better rethought in terms of how it relates to OCS.

What would you think about being able to view stats per year and per scheduled conference side-by-side? I think the more useful numbers in this case would be the by-conference ones -- you'd be able to see # of registrants per scheduled conference; # of submissions vs. acceptances; etc. The per-year numbers would still likely be useful, at least in some cases, but I do agree that it would be good to have both.

Cheers,
James

[osborne]

Hi James.

I'm talking about the stats on the
manager/statistics
page. I'm not sure what you mean by the "report functionality"---I just mean that the numbers on the page seem possibly misleading. They would make sense for a journal, but for a conference it seems to me that one wants a single column of numbers with the totals in it. You could put both the totals and the per-year numbers as you suggest. I'm hard-pressed to think of a reason someone would be interested in the per-year numbers---in the context of a conference, a year seems completely arbitrary (unless there are conferences that accept submissions more than a year in advance?)---but I suppose there's really no loss in including them! (If the per-year numbers are included, I suggest adding an explanation. I assumed that the "2009" column heading represented this year's incarnation of my conference, and spent quite a while figuring out why only 30 papers were listed as accepted when in fact I had accepted 31. I fiddled around with MySQL for quite a while before I figured it out!)

Best
Martin

[jmacgreg]

Hi Martin,

I've reported this: see http://pkp.sfu.ca/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=4184, and please feel free to post any additional comments (or fixes!). I've laid out what I see as the best all-round solution.

Thanks for pointing this out!
James