Page 85 - Fall2020

Table 1. Technical Committee Breakdowns
Acoustical Society of America
(N = 1,117)
The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America
(N = 1,619)
Acoustics Today (N = 729)
Acoustical Oceanography
2.6%
2.3%
4.1%
Animal Bioacoustics
5.6%
5.9%
5.6%
Architectural Acoustics
15.7%
7.6%
16.9%
Biomedical Acoustics
3.9%
4.1%
4.3%
Computational Acoustics
0.9%
n/a
1.9%
Engineering Acoustics
7.8%
7.7%
6.5%
Musical Acoustics
4.4%
4.6%
5.1%
Noise
8.9%
7.4%
10.4%
Physical Acoustics
7.5%
10.1%
6.0%
Psychological and Physiological Acoustics
13.0%
11.7%
15.1%
Signal Processing
5.5%
8.6%
4.1%
Speech Communication
13.3%
16.4%
11.0%
Structural Acoustics and Vibration
3.6%
5.2%
2.1%
Underwater Acoustics
7.5%
8.5%
7.0%
This suggests that AT’s readership closely reflects the demographics of the overall Society and that the maga- zine is reaching our goal of catering to the diverse areas of interest within the Society.
Another aspect we wanted to consider about AT read- ers was their professional affiliation. Figure 2 shows the breakdown of professional affiliation for AT, JASA, and the ASA as a whole. As a publication presenting new research results, JASA understandably finds the major- ity of its readership in academia. And although AT certainly has its fair share of academics, a third of our readers either work in industry or as consultants. As with TC affiliations, AT readers’ professional affiliations more closely parallel those of the Society at large.
How Do They Read Acoustics Today? Once we answered the question of who reads AT, we wanted to find out more about how they read AT. The first thing we wanted to know was whether people were more likely to read the magazine online or in print. Although we live in a digital age, it turns out the majority of respon- dents read our print edition, whether some or all of the time. Out of the 758 responses we received, 331 (43.7%)
said they only read the print format, whereas 343 (45.3%) said they might read either online or in print.
Of course, this breakdown may be related to age group, with more digitally attuned younger members reading more online than older members. We didn’t ask respondents’ ages, but we could do a comparison based on how long respon- dents had been in the ASA (which I’ll refer to as their “ASA age” going forward). Obviously, it’s not a perfect compari- son, but the results were interesting nonetheless.
As shown in Figure 3, newer (and presumably younger) members were more likely than any other ASA age group to only read the magazine’s online edition, with 22.8% of respondents who had been members less than 5 years saying that they read the online version exclusively. This ASA age group also had the lowest proportion of respon- dents who said they only read the print edition, but, to be clear, these readers still made up 31.7% of the respon- dents in this ASA age group!
Meanwhile, our longer term members, those with ASA ages over 26 years, were less likely to read just the online edition, with 4% reporting only reading AT online. These
Fall 2020 • Acoustics Today 85