  In this study, we propose a novel way to explore the patterns of people's
visits to academic articles. About 3.4 million links to referral source of
visitors of 1432 papers published in the journal of PeerJ are collected and
analyzed. We find that at least 57% visits are from external referral sources,
among which General Search Engine, Social Network, and News & Blog are the top
three categories of referrals. Academic Resource, including academic search
engines and academic publishers' sites, is the fourth largest category of
referral sources. In addition, our results show that Google contributes
significantly the most in directing people to scholarly articles. This
encompasses the usage of Google the search engine, Google Scholar the academic
search engine, and diverse specific country domains of them. Focusing on
similar disciplines to PeerJ's publication scope, NCBI is the academic search
engine on which people are the most frequently directed to PeerJ. Correlation
analysis and regression analysis indicates that papers with more mentions are
expected to have more visitors, and Facebook, Twitter and Reddit are the most
commonly used social networking tools that refer people to PeerJ.
