Once I finish my stuff, I might publish some of it - which should give ppl. a better estimate of what is going on in "Rippleland" (e.g. I have seen VERY different estimates about how many XRP are now dispersed amongst users). I'm not too sure about the format though and how to actually profit from it (I invest already quite some time), maybe charge some BTC amounts for a paper on coindl.
Cool... I've posted an API stub if you want to gather some more precise data. Look forward to your paper...
https://github.com/d4n13