[4] In January 2013, SSRN was ranked the largest open-access repository in the world by Ranking Web of Repositories (an initiative of the Cybermetrics Lab, a research group belonging to the Spanish National Research Council),[5] measured by number of PDF files, backlinks and Google Scholar results.

[11] Academic papers in Portable Document Format can be uploaded directly to the SSRN site by authors and are then available around the world for download.

[12] Users can also subscribe to abstracting emails covering a broad range of research areas and topic specialties.

These distributing emails contain abstracts (with links to the full text where applicable) of papers recently submitted to SSRN in the respective field.

[15] On SSRN, authors and papers are ranked by their number of downloads, which has become an informal indicator of popularity on prepress and open access sites.