A lot of researchers have been recently extremely unfair, criticizing Elsevier one major editor of academic journals. Yes, it is a big publisher. So what? When you publish a paper in any journal that belongs to that group, you now have access to amazing statistics, via scopus.

Not only you know how many time the pdf file has been downloaded (you can also get that information on arxiv or ssrn), but you can get much more!

You can even know how many time the pdf has been opened, and you can even visualize on which paragraph readers spent more time, while reading it! This EyeTrackPDF tool is just amazing!

(you need to pay to get details per IP address, the standard graph is an average of eyetracker information, from what I understood). You can see where are the most interesting parts of the paper, which is quite informative actually

Of course, on all the papers, what we observe is that people spend most of the time on the references, checking for their own names, making sure that their work was mentioned! You can even get an understanding score, which is an estimation of the number of readers that might have understood the paper 

Awesome, isn’t it?