The data snapshot date (August 30, 2019) may not be the date that the 'abstract views' was last crawled.
Rich Abdill:
There is a "last_crawled" field in the "articles" table that indicates the last time that preprint's download metrics were updated; that may be a more precise denominator, but it should almost always be within 14 days of the snapshot.
The Shadow Index is currently a little inaccurate -- this will matter most for the more recent preprints (2 weeks is a larger difference there in denominator value of +-14 days).
Proposed update:
Normalise 'abstract views' to number of days between posting date (posted) and last crawled date (last_crawled).