Stochastic Model for the Electronic Access of an Article

As a result of rapid developments in Information Technology, the world is changing from the traditional paper environment to electronic environment. However, bibliometric studies in electronic environment are rare. This is a pioneer study which forecasts the use of an electronic document .It collects thirty nine month's read statistics of an article selected from Repec database and analyze this data using modern forecasting techniques and obtains a stochastic model ARIMA (1,1,0). The present study explains how this model can be used to forecast the future reads of the article and uses the model to examine the characteristics of the read or the diffusion of knowledge/ideas of the article. The study further describes the way to determine the obsolescence (in terms of reads) of an article, with age and examines the possibility of weeding out in an electronic environment.