Studying e-journal user behavior using log files: The experience of SuperJournal

Understanding user behavior with electronic services is now a major concern of journal publishers, librarians, and others. Various electronic journal log files are offering researchers and practitioners a rich data resource f or user studies. This article reports the experience of using the log file data to understand user behavior in the SuperJournal project, addressing me thodological and analytical issues that may have wider relevance. The purpo se of this article is to provide guidance for log file processing and analy sis focusing on users, and to begin the process of standardizing analysis p rocedures to facilitate the comparison of user behavior observed in differe nt projects.