UC San Diego

This article summarizes findings from a study of author/depositor distribution patterns within scholarly digital repositories. At the moment, evaluative frameworks are in short supply for institutional and disciplinary repositories (Kim & Kim, 2006). After a review of issues of scholars participating in digital repositories, author/depositor distribution is analyzed as one possible technique that might be used to judge the success of a repository. This statistical technique was used to evaluate participation patterns among more than 30,000 author/depositors whose works were found in various categories of digital repositories. Findings from this analysis, including comparisons of participation patterns across three categories of scholarly repositories, are presented along with an explanation of the questions and challenges that arose during the study. The article concludes with an evaluation of the analytical technique and its potential as one metric for judging a repository's success.