The Social Science Research Network (SSRN) has grown substantially during the last 12 months. The SSRN eLibrary currently has 375,000 paper abstracts from over 175,000 authors and has received 60,000 new submissions during the year. The eLibrary recently delivered its 50 millionth full-text paper download. This is a significant milestone.
During the last year, SSRN changed its server architecture to improve the speed of searches, enhance overall stability and provide the infrastructure required to meet the continued growth. In recent tests, the average eLibrary search time has decreased from 4.5 seconds to less than 1 second. In addition, SSRN's Citereader project with ITX Corp. has extracted 7.4 million references, 4.7 million citations, and 7.7 million footnotes from 306,000 full text papers.
In 2012, SSRN plans to continue expanding its interdisciplinary growth in the social sciences and humanities by creating research networks in Sustainability, Innovation, Rhetoric, Anthropology and Hebrew.
