Hacker News Reader

> Downloads equal to zero != not available.

I'm wondering about this too. What could be the possible other reason for the papers not being downloaded? Boring titles? Preprints easily available? Open access?

> and there's no reason to believe they weren't available back then.

Is it possible that the articles really were not available, as they used the data from sep-2015 to feb-2016, early version of SciHub?

View on HN

> Is it possible that the articles really were not available, as they used the data from sep-2015 to feb-2016, early version of SciHub?

That's within the realm of possibilities but sure doesn't sound like the case the way they described their methodology. That would have required a catalog of available papers on Sci-Hub too, but the dataset they used only contained download logs, so they couldn't have known whether a zero-download paper was available or not (unless I misunderstood what the first dataset is about).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com