You’ve definitely been guilty of downloading a PDF (Portable Document Format) file at least once in your life, but according to a World Bank report, the popularity of this format may be slowly dying. It’s not that research or academic papers and other data is not being distributed through PDF online, but fewer people seem to be interested in downloading documents in this format.
The World Bank says that in a period spanning five years between 2008 and 2012, only 25 policy reports which amount to 2% of the dataset included in the calculations were downloaded more than 1000 times. 517 out of 1611 papers or over 30% of the total PDF documents were not downloaded at all. A rough estimate of the numbers imply that almost one third of the organization’s reports have never been downloaded by anyone.
Of course, not all bits of data released as PDF files and counted in the study, are meant for consumption by the general public. Complex policy reports like those focusing on multiple sectors or core diagnostic reports are more likely to be downloaded and cited. The information covering downloads was collected for each and every policy report which is part of the World Bank’s D&R (Documents and Records) database.
The 130,000 documents which were made part of the survey do not account for all papers rolled out by the World Bank. D&R also offers a URL link to the PDF and this proved to play an important role in facilitating the collection of downloaded information. Mining data and importing content for other formats is not always possible. The whole point of the study is that a lot of knowledge is being ignored and left to rot on servers.
The shortcomings of PDF for delivering data-rich, interactive reports or documents are being realized even more than before. But does this mean this file format is dying?