This may seem a strange question to ask for someone working in academia – of course a publication matters, especially if it is cited a lot. However, when it comes to publications about web resources, publications and citations in my opinion mainly serve as somewhat odd proxies on my CV for what really matters: the web resources themselves and how much they are used.
Still, one could hope that a publication about a new web resource would make people aware of its existence and thus attract more users. To analyze this, I took a look at the user statistics of our recently developed resource COMPARTMENTS:
Before publishing a paper about it, the web resource had less than 5 unique users per day. Our paper about the resource was accepted on January 26 in the journal Database, which increased the usage to about 10 unique users on a typical weekday. The spike of 41 unique users in a single day was due to me teaching on a course.
So what happened end of June that gave a more than 10-fold increase in the number of users from one day to the next? A new version of GeneCards was released with links to COMPARTMENTS. It seems safe to conclude that the peer-reviewed literature is not where most researchers discover new tools.
Buried Treasure 