Enhanced online user-interaction tracking and document rendition

• US 10,824,682 B2
• Filed: 09/28/2018
• Issued: 11/03/2020
• Est. Priority Date: 05/19/2015
• Status: Active Grant

• Current Assignee: ResearchGATE GmbH
• Original Assignee: ResearchGATE GmbH
• Inventors: Alvares, Darren, Kelly, Niall, Zholudev, Vyacheslav, Tolke, Axel, Howard-Banks, Mark, Mansfield, Stephen, Irrgang, Steffen
• Primary Examiner(s): Keehn, Richard G
• Application Number:
  US16/146,545
• Publication Number:
  US 20190034424A1
• Time in Patent Office: 767 Days
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 16/24578 using ranking
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 16/93 Document management systems
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 16/9535 Search customisation based on user profiles and personalisation
• CPC Class Codes: G06Q 30/02 Marketing; Price estimation or determination; Fundraising
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 67/01 Protocols
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 67/02 based on web technology, e.g. hypertext transfer protocol [HTTP]
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 67/1044 Group management mechanisms management of multicast group membership H04L12/185; reconfiguring of node membership in a computing system to eliminate errors G06F11/1425
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 67/535 Tracking the activity of the user network monitoring arrangements H04L43/00; recording of computer activity G06F11/34

Abstract

Disclosed are systems and methods for enhanced tracking of user interactions with online documents, such as, in accordance with various embodiments, interaction tracking on a sub-document level of granularity and/or interaction tracking that involves storing one or more interaction parameters (e.g., an identifier of the document or of the interacting user) for each interaction.

Claims

1. A method comprising:

serving a web site providing access to a plurality of electronically stored documents;

tracking user interactions with the documents and electronically storing, for each of the interactions, a plurality of interaction parameters comprising at least an identifier of the document interacted with, a type of interaction, and a duration of interaction;

computing, with one or more computer processors, document-specific impact scores for the documents by aggregating, for each document, interactions with that document across multiple interacting users into a weighted count of interactions, each interaction in the count being weighted based at least in part on the type of interaction and at least some of the interactions in the count being weighted further based on the duration of interaction; and

electronically communicating the impact scores to at least some of the users.

2. The method of claim 1, wherein electronically communicating the impact scores comprises publishing the impact scores along with the documents on the web site.

3. The method of claim 1, wherein electronically communicating the impact scores comprises sending the impact scores to individual users or groups of users in electronic notifications.

4. The method of claim 3, wherein the notifications are sent, triggered by milestones reached by publications, to at least one of the respective authors of the publications or the respective authors'"'"' colleagues.

5. The method of claim 1, wherein the operations further comprise:

aggregating the impact scores over documents by a given author to determine an author-specific reputation score.

6. The method of claim 1, wherein the types of interactions associated with the user interactions with the documents comprise at least one of views, reads, downloads, scroll-throughs, follows, copy-and-pastes, clicks, highlights, mark-ups, annotations, citations, or comments.

7. The method of claim 1, wherein weighting of interaction types in the weighted count reflect respective levels of engagement within a hierarchy of interaction types.

8. The method of claim 1, wherein the interaction parameters further comprise identifiers of the interacting users performing the interactions, the interactions within the count for each document being weighted based further on attributes of the interacting users.

9. The method of claim 1, wherein the interaction parameters further comprise a time stamp, the interactions being aggregated over a time window specified relative to a time of computation of the document-specific impact scores.

10. The method of claim 1, further comprising tracking how interaction metrics evolve as a function of time to evaluate correlations between user interactions with a publication and author-provided modifications to the publication.

11. The method of claim 1, further comprising:

computing separate interaction counts for different types of interaction as a function of time; and

finding mathematical correlations between an interaction count of one type of interaction at a first time and an interaction count of another, different type of interaction at a second time to discover consumption patterns.

12. The method of claim 11, further comprising:

making, based on the correlations, at least one of predictions of future interactions, invitations to a review a document, or suggestions to cite a document.

13. The method of claim 1, wherein the documents are research articles, the method further comprising:

forming reference groups of subsets of the plurality of documents based on at least one of research discipline, funding source, country, publication date, or author seniority; and

ranking the documents within the reference groups based on the computed impact scores.

14. A system comprising:

one or more computer processors operatively to execute instructions stored in one or more machine-readable media to implement a plurality of components comprising;

a front-end subsystem configured to serve web content providing access to a plurality of electronically stored documents, and to track user interactions with the documents, each of the interactions having an associated set of interaction parameters comprising at least an identifier of the document interacted with, a type of interaction, and a duration of interaction; and

an interaction processing subsystem configured to compute document-specific impact scores for the documents by aggregating, for each document, interactions with that document across multiple interacting users into a weighted count of interactions, each interaction in the count being weighted based at least in part on the type of interaction and at least some of the interactions in the count being weighted further based on the duration of interaction, the interaction processing system further to send the impact scores to the front-end subsystem for inclusion in the web content.

15. The system of claim 14, wherein the web content comprises Java script or HTML forms configured for user-interaction tracking.

16. The system of claim 14, wherein the interaction processing subsystem is further configured to aggregate the impact scores over documents by a given author to determine an author-specific reputation score.

17. The system of claim 14, wherein weighting of interaction types in the weighted count reflect respective levels of engagement within a hierarchy of interaction types.

18. The system of claim 14, wherein the front-end subsystem is further configured to send the impact scores to individual users or groups of users in electronic notifications.

19. The system of claim 14, wherein the interaction parameters further comprise a time stamp, the interactions being aggregated over a time window specified relative to a time of computation of the document-specific impact scores.

20. One or more machine-readable hardware storage devices storing instructions for execution by one or more processors, the instructions, when executed, causing the one or more processors to perform operations comprising:

serving a web site providing access to a plurality of electronically stored documents;

tracking user interactions with the documents and electronically storing, for each of the interactions, a plurality of interaction parameters comprising at least an identifier of the document interacted with, a type of interaction, and a duration of interaction;

computing, with one or more computer processors, document-specific impact scores for the documents by aggregating, for each document, interactions with that document across multiple interacting users into a weighted count of interactions, each interaction in the count being weighted based at least in part on the type of interaction and at least some of the interactions in the count being weighted further based on the duration of interaction; and

electronically communicating impact scores to at least some of the users.