Project MUSE Usage Statistics
Project MUSE provides usage statistics compliant with Release 5 of the COUNTER Code of Practice. COUNTER 5 reporting is available for usage recorded in the current calendar year and for two years prior.
Statistics for each month are updated and available for downloading by the 14th of the following month. MUSE usage statistics reports may be obtained in either Excel or XML format, providing subscribing institutions with the flexibility to import their statistics into a variety of tools. MUSE supports reporting at the consortium level for acquisitions made via consortium subscriptions or purchases. A MUSE library dashboard account is required; log in using the yellow button on any of the library pages or create a new account.
For more information on the COUNTER Code of Practice, please visit the COUNTER web site. We recommend reviewing the helpful user guides to COUNTER Release 5, and COUNTER 5 tutorial videos.
UPDATE
Project MUSE is COUNTER compliant. Nevertheless, over the course of 2025, we observed sustained increases in overall usage across the Project MUSE platform. At times, this increase in usage impacted product performance. A portion of this activity has been confirmed as DDoS-relevant traffic ("bots" and other non-human traffic); however, a significant amount of the increased usage cannot be clearly scoped or classified. We have used all available tools to filter and mitigate where possible, but only the traffic we could definitively identify as malicious has been removed from usage counts. As a result, reported usage across MUSE for much of 2025 is exponentially higher than historical normas, and we are not able to further adjust or refine these numbers beyond what has already been done. In December 2025, we made some change to the user experience to try to mitigate this non-human traffic. These changes were necessary to protect system stability, but they ultimately impacted usage. Beginning in mid-December 2025, customers may see that recorded usage dropped significantly because we are now questioning and validating most hits before serving conetent.
This is the current state of affairs, and at this time, there are no additional adjustments we can make to usage reporting or filtering without compromising system integrity.
Retrieve Your Project MUSE Usage Statistics
MUSE offers the following reports, compliant with Release 5 of the COUNTER Code of Practice:
- PR: Platform Master Report
- PR_P1: Platform Usage
- DR: Database Master Report
- DR_D1: Database Search and Item Usage
- DR_D2: Database Access Denied
- TR: Title Master Report
- TR_B1: Book Requests (Excluding OA_Gold)
- TR_B2: Book Access Denied
- TR_B3: Book Usage by Access Type
- TR_J1: Journal Requests (Excluding OA_Gold)
- TR_J2: Journal Access Denied
- TR_J3: Journal Usage by Access Type
- TR_J4: Journal Requests by YOP (Excluding OA_Gold)
