The citation advantage of open‐access articles

Abstract

Four subjects, ecology, applied mathematics, sociology and economics, were selected to assess whether there is a citation advantage between journal articles that have an open access (OA) version on the Internet compared to those articles that are exclusively toll access (TA). Citations were counted using the Web of Science and the OA status of articles was determined by searching OAIster, OpenDOAR, Google and Google Scholar. Of a sample of 4633 articles examined, 2280 (49%) were OA and had a mean citation count of 9.04, whereas the mean for TA articles was 5.76. There appears to be a clear citation advantage for those articles that are OA as opposed to those that are TA. This advantage, however, varies between disciplines, with sociology having the highest citation advantage but the lowest number of OA articles from the sample taken and ecology having the highest individual citation count for OA articles but the smallest citation advantage. Tests of correlation or association between OA status and a number of variables were generally found to be weak or inconsistent. The cause of this citation advantage has not been determined.

¿Favorece la publicación en abierto el impacto de los artículos científicos? Un estudio empírico en el ámbito de la medicina intensiva

“…Sin embargo, en otro estudio realizado en el ámbito de la oftalmología 13 , la accesibilidad no fue un factor significativo para explicar los datos de citación. La ventaja del acceso abierto varía mucho en función de la disciplina 8,24,25 , lo que podría explicar las discrepancias entre ámbitos científicos tan dispares como la medicina intensiva y la oftalmología. En nuestro estudio, también se observaron variaciones entre materias específicas del mismo ámbito científico.…”

University Faculty Awareness and Attitudes towards Open Access Publishing and the Institutional Repository: A Case Study

“…Many studies have looked into whether OA publications truly have citation impact advantages. More studies favoring the OA advantage exist (Antelman, 2004;Eysenbach, 2006;Gargouri, et al, 2010;Harnad & Brody, 2004;Norris, Oppenheim, & Rowland, 2008;Perkel, 2006;Xia & Nakanishi, 2012) than those that found no advantage (Craig, Plume, McVeigh, Pringle, & Amin, 2007;Davis & Fromerth, 2007;Kurtz & Henneken, 2007;Moed, 2007).…”

Disseminating Knowledge: From Potential to Reality—New Open-Access Journals Collide With Convention

“…Academic influence is traditionally measured by the number of citations articles receive. The expectation is that papers published in OA journals could potentially receive more citations than those published in conventional journals (see Harnad & Brody, 2004;Norris, Oppenheim & Rowland, 2008). Is this expectation accurate for POA management journals?…”