Do open access journal articles experience a citation advantage? Results and methodological reflections of an application of multiple measures to an analysis by WoS subject areas

Abstract

This study is one of the first that uses the recently introduced open access (OA) labels in the Web of Science (WoS) metadata to investigate whether OA articles published in Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) listed journals experience a citation advantage in comparison to subscription journal articles, specifically those of which no self-archived versions are available. Bibliometric data on all articles and reviews indexed in WoS, and published from 2013 to 2015, were analysed. In addition to normalised citation score (NCS), we used two additional measures of citation advantage: whether an article was cited at all; and whether an article is among the most frequently cited percentile of articles within its respective subject area (pptopX %). For each WoS subject area, the strength of the relationship between access status (whether an article was published in an OA journal) and each of these three measures was calculated. We found that OA journal articles experience a citation advantage in very few subject areas and, in most of these subject areas, the citation advantage was found on only a single measure of citation advantage, namely whether the article was cited at all. Our results lead us to conclude that access status accounts for little of the variability in the number of citations an article accumulates. The methodology and the calculations that were used in this study are described in detail and we believe that the lessons we learnt, and the recommendations we make, will be of much use to future researchers interested in using the WoS OA labels, and to the field of citation advantage in general.

Citation Advantage of Promoted Articles in a Cross-Publisher Distribution Platform: 36-Month Follow-up to a Randomized Controlled Trial

“…The findings of our study significantly add to the limited corpus of literature examining the efficacy of strategies to augment citation counts of peer-reviewed research. Though publishing research in OA journals is the most widely studied strategy to augment citation counts, the extent to which the OACA exists or is confounded by selection bias remains unknown [ 7 , 11 , 12 , 15 , 16 ]. In addition, even if the OACA did exist at some point in time in the past, the more that OA content becomes the standard, the less likely the strategy will yield citation benefits as the effect will be ubiquitous across all articles.…”

“…One of the most widely studied strategies examined to increase discoverability, accessibility, and consequential citation counts of scholarly work is publishing content in open access (OA) journals. OA increases visibility and hence can have a positive effect on usage metrics such as the number of downloads [ 7 ], but the effect on citations is less clear and likely discipline dependent [ 8 - 12 ]. Since the first carefully designed multivariate observational study in 2006 showed a clear OA citation advantage even when adjusted for possible confounders [ 8 , 9 , 13 ], several large observational studies have found OA articles accrue between 50% to 200% more citations compared to closed access articles; this is referred to as the “open access citation advantage” (OACA) [ 8 , 14 ].…”

From Biosensors to Drug Delivery and Tissue Engineering: Open Biomaterials Research

“…The benefits of publishing open access include the potential for greater usage and more visibility of your work with a broader geographic research readership and, therefore, potentially higher citations. 1 − 3 From the 2020 ACS Open Access Survey ( ), many authors were motivated to publish Open Access by personal support of the principles of open science and from a desire to increase the visibility of their research.…”

Ser ou não ser muito citado: fatores associados à citação de artigos científicos

“…Estudo recente de Basson et al (2021) analisou dados bibliométricos de todos os artigos e revisões indexados na WoS e publicados entre 2013 e 2015. Os autores observaram que a vantagem de citação foi encontrada para uma única variável, a saber, se o artigo em acesso aberto foi ou não citado (e não se ele recebeu mais citações que aqueles em acesso restrito, por exemplo).…”

“…Os autores observaram que a vantagem de citação foi encontrada para uma única variável, a saber, se o artigo em acesso aberto foi ou não citado (e não se ele recebeu mais citações que aqueles em acesso restrito, por exemplo). Além disso, os artigos em acesso aberto apresentaram uma vantagem de citação apenas em poucas áreas temáticas (Basson et al, 2021). Similarmente, estudo que testou se artigos em acesso aberto apresentavam maior atividade altmétrica mostrou diferenças entre disciplinas (Holmberg et al, 2020).…”