How best to show journal usage and publications, over time

[#1]

I commonly analyze packages of scientific journals, and we often want to know if there are titles that are not being used that we can stop subscribing to.  I usually graph usage (download count) vs. publications (how many papers did our authors publish in that journal) for a given year.  Generally, high use journals will have more publications, though not always.

Creating this graph every year gives me multiple independent snapshots of each journal's performance.  But how can I best compare these yearly graphs to each other?  Is this low (or high) performing journal from this year one that is a common underachiever, or was this just an outlier year?  The packages usually contain anywhere from 70-150 individual journal titles, so the plots are fairly cluttered already, which is why I am reluctant to color-code by year and symbol-code by title.

What are some recommendations to track a journal title over time, while also seeing the bigger picture?

[#2]

Regarding "But how can I best compare these yearly graphs to each other?", I would generally advocate using a local data filter, possibly with animation, with your favourite graph types. In this case I would define 'Year' to have Modelling Type 'Ordinal' and filter by that. You may also need to 'Lock Scales' of graphs to facilitate the comparison.

[#3]

Thanks, Ian.  I don't know about local data filters.  I found a JMP help page that walks through an example and will go through that today.

https://www.jmp.com/support/help/en/15.2/index.shtml#page/jmp/local-data-filter.shtml