Cancer Research Journal Report to Our Readers
A belief that embracing an open source philosophy can be a pathway to empowering patients, researchers, legislators and all those engaged in the fight against cancer is a core value here at Cancer Research Journal. In that spirit, I wanted to share with you a few metrics from Google Analytics regarding our performance to date and take a brief look ahead to some things planned for 2009.
The First Fifteen Months:
On May 22, 2007 Cancer Research Journal published our first post. September 30, 2008 marked the end of the last full calendar quarter that we have user data for. So with those two endpoints in mind, here’s a chart that tracks the growth in unique visitors to CancerResearchJournal.com during that time period, broken out by calendar quarter.

Digging a little deeper, the numbers suggest that 76% of these visitors arrived here via a search engine — with 87% of this search engine traffic from Google, 5% from Yahoo and the rest from Live, Ask and a few others.
Other sites or email messages which contained links to this site accounted for about 12% of traffic. These are sometimes called referrers or referring sites, and Bloglines, del.icio.us and Inspire led the way in this category.
That leaves about 12% of you who arrived here directly by entering CancerResearchJournal.com into your browser, or by using a previous bookmark for return visitors. And regarding browsers – 69% of all visitors used some version of Internet Explorer, 24% Firefox, 5% Safari, with the remaining roughly 1% split among Opera, Chrome and a few others.
During this span, and among all types of visitors, these 10 posts generated the most page views:
Cuba Approves CimaVax EGF Vaccine for Lung Cancer
Kanzius Machine Uses Radio Waves to Kill Cancer Cells
Fighting Cancer with Social Media
Canine Cancer Patients Benefit from Cliff Book
KRAS is Key to Choosing Colorectal Cancer Chemotherapy
Five Year Old Eye Cancer Survivor Excels At Golf
NSF, IBM and Google Collaborate to Give Scientists a CluE
Mayo Clinic Oncologists Answer Cancer Questions Online
Yale Uses Rabies-Related Virus to Target Brain Tumors
Korean Cancer Patients Battle Blues With Laughter Therapy
In total, during this period there were 8,795 total visits from 7,499 unique visitors from 109 different countries, with 36% of all visitors accessing the site from networks based outside of the United States.

These figures imply that 1,296 unique users, or roughly 17%, visited here more than once. Combined, all visitors generated 16,975 impressions with each user spending an average of 2 minutes and 13 seconds here per visit.
What do these numbers mean for Cancer Research Journal?
While the global mix of visitors and a sustained growth rate in readership of about 100% a quarter are encouraging, the relatively modest unique visitor total makes clear there remains much work to do.
A Look Ahead to 2009:
In the second half of 2008 Cancer Research Journal began adding new features that reflect a greater commitment to locating and delivering quality video content regarding cancer research, as well as aggregating content related to cancer research from other publications. Look for those areas to continue to grow in 2009 as well as an effort to become a more effective advocate for the use of modern information sharing techniques to be applied to the distribution of news and information regarding cancer research.
This publication believes that the same energy and effort devoted to SEO and other Social Media techniques that commercial businesses put into helping you find information about their consumer products and services can be utilized by organizations and individuals involved in fighting cancer to help make it easier to share and find high quality information about the latest breakthroughs that are important to you.
Moving knowledge out of silos and into systems is key.
Whether by serving as a place to try out some of these new ideas, sharing success stories about how others in the field of cancer research are adopting forward thinking information distribution strategies, or by consulting directly with organizations to assist in implementing fresh approaches — Cancer Research Journal will be working to help cancer patients, families, legislators and medical professionals locate the new information they need.
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related links: caBIG; Alliance for Taxpayer Access
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