Case Study: American Psychological Association achieves subsecond search and rapid content delivery with MarkLogic

Innovative Publisher Cuts Costs and Improves Time to Market

The American Psychological Association (APA), a major academic publisher founded in 1892 with 150,000 members, manages large scholarly collections including PsycINFO and PsycARTICLES. Handling 160,000 full articles, 3 million abstracts and 54 million cited references under heavy traffic (>1M hits/day) exposed limitations of their Lucene-based search: added architectural complexity, inconsistent response times and painfully slow content delivery that could take up to 48 hours.

APA replaced Lucene with MarkLogic, consolidating search and database into a single platform. Within four months they achieved consistent subsecond query speeds, cut server count from 10 to 3, reduced content push time from up to two days to minutes, lowered maintenance overhead (index work now a small part‑time task), and freed developers to add features—delivering faster time-to-market and measurable business benefits.

American Psychological Association

Beverly Jamison

Senior Director, IT Architecture