Editing IRStats2 (section)

==Core concepts==

===Datatype===
Datatype refers to which data to provide with IRStats2 able to process any of data on your repository. The typical use of IRStats2 is however for usage statistics so this is the main dataset, but data on deposits, open access, full text (etc) are also processed. Some repositories even include data from Scopus (citation counts).

Main datatypes:

*downloads: good old download statistics - downloads of full-text documents
*views: number of hits on the summary page (of a publication)
*deposits: number of publications deposited
*doc_access: provides 4 metrics (full_text, no_full_text, open_access and no_open_access) used for computing percentages of Open Access and Full-Text *documents in the repository
*doc_format: MIME type of full-texts
*history: analysis of the "history" dataset - this provides information on when publications were created, edited, made live, deleted etc.
*referrer: information on how site visitors got to the repository (e.g. from Google, internal uni pages, etc)
*search_terms: if coming from a search site (or the internal EPrints search) which words were used to get to the publication
*browser: which browser visitors used on the repository

===Sets===
By default, IRStats2 returns data over the entire repository, i.e. the entire set of eprints is assumed. You can however restrict which "set" to use: the publications of an author, of a university division, of a subject, etc.

===Dates and ranges===
You can also restrict by dates or by a range. By default, all the stats are returned without any dates restrictions.

Dates can be set as YYYYMMDD or YYYY-MM-DD or YYYY/MM/DD (e.g. 20170101, 2017-11-04 etc). Dates is a hash containing two keys: from and to (either may be omitted to say: from that particular date, or up to that particular date).

Ranges follow a %d%c format and the upper limit is "now" or "today", for instance:

*6m: over the past 6 months
*12d: over the past 12 days
*3y: over the past 3 years

Only "m" (months), "d" (days) or "y" (years) may be used. 12m is the same as 1y.

===Groupings===
This tells IRStats2 how to group data and is generally only used for things like "give me the TOP eprints", "give me the TOP authors".

So having a "grouping" set to "eprint" means the top eprints. If set to "authors", the top authors etc. The grouping must be a valid set except for when it equals to "eprint".

===Misc===
It is possible to limit the amount of records being returned (for when this is relevant: if you want the top downloads, since the beginning of time, then you'd only get one data row back, which is that count). But for queries which ask for, say, the top authors, it is then interesting to be able to get only the first 10 authors. 10 here is the limit.

It is also possible to ask IRStats2 to return certain data field in queries. For top eprints, you generally want the "eprintid" field. To draw timeline graphs (eg. evolution of downloads over-time), you'd want the "datestamp" field. More examples are illustrated below.