Clicks versus Citations: Click Count as a Metric in High Energy Physics Publishing

High-energy physicists worldwide rely on online resources such as SPIRES and arXiv to perform gather research and share their own publications. SPIRES is a tool designed to search the literature within high-energy physics, while arXiv provides the actual full-text documents of this literature. In high-energy physics, papers are often ranked according to the number of citations they acquire - meaning the number of times a later paper references the original. This paper investigates the correlation between the number of times a paper is clicked in order to be downloaded and the number of citations it receives following the click. It explores how physicists truly read what they cite