Usage

The Usage tab of a member area summarises what that member has contributed to the hub and how much use those contributions have had. It is supplied by the Members - Usage plugin, and it appears on every member's profile, not only your own.

People look at this tab for one of two reasons: to write a line in an annual report or a grant renewal — the tool has served 400 users and been cited nine times — or to see whether anyone is actually using what they contributed.

Read the warning at the end before you rely on any of the numbers. Half of this page reports figures the CMS does not collect, and a zero in those columns means nothing at all. Do not put a number from this tab into a report without checking first that your hub is collecting it.

Finding it

1. Log in and go to your member area at /members/myaccount.
2. Select Usage in the tab list down the left-hand side.

If the tab is not there, the hub has not enabled the plugin.

A line at the top of the tab reads Usage is calculated on the last day of every month, with a link to the hub-wide /usage page.

What the tab shows

Table 1: Overview

Row	What it counts
Contributions	Published, publicly accessible resources you are credited on, excluding ones where your only role is submitter.
Rank by Contributions	Your position when every contributor on the hub is ordered by that count.
First Contribution	The publication date of your earliest.
Last Contribution	The publication date of your most recent.
Citations on Contributions	Distinct citations recorded against resources you are credited on.
Usage in Courses/Classrooms	How many users, classes, and schools have used your contributions in a course. Only shown when there is data.

Table 2: Simulation Tool Usage

One row per simulation tool you are credited on: Users served in last 12 months, Simulation Runs in last 12 months, Total users served, Total Simulation Runs, Citations, and the date it was Published, with totals underneath.

Table 3: "and more" Usage

The same shape for your other contributed resources — anything that is not a tool — with users served over twelve months and in total.

What actually works

The two halves of this tab have different sources, and only one of them is filled in by the CMS.

Computed live, and reliable: contributions, rank, first and last contribution, and citations. These are counted from the hub's own resource, authorship, and citation tables every time you open the tab.

Read from tables nothing in the CMS writes: every "users served" and "simulation runs" figure, and the courses and classrooms row. Those come from #__author_stats, #__resource_stats_tools, and #__metrics_author_cluster. The tables are created when the hub is installed, but no code in the CMS ever puts a row in them. They are filled by the hub's metrics tooling, which is separate software installed alongside the hub.

If the statistics tables are missing entirely, the whole tab is replaced by Required database table not found.

The hub-wide usage page

/usage is a different page: the hub's own statistics, not yours. Its tabs cover visits, downloads, simulation users and simulation jobs over a choice of time periods, and where a hub enables them, breakdowns by country, organisation type, domain, and partner, plus a map.

It has the same prerequisite, and more of it — /usage reads a whole separate statistics database that nothing in this repository writes, and most of its maps use a Google Maps API retired in 2013. A hub without metrics collection shows missing-table errors there rather than an empty report. The terms it uses are defined in Simulation usage definitions; the administrator's view of the same problem is in Usage in the Hub managers book.