All entries for Thursday 22 November 2007

Early evidence of Open Access citation advantage still useful

Writing about web page http://opcit.eprints.org/oacitation-biblio.html

Does OA self-archiving of articles that are later published in peer-reviewed scholarly journals actually increase citation of these articles? Definitely yes and the body of evidence keeps growing and increasing in sophistication.

Steve Hitchcock rightly notes “citation analysis is specialised and difficult”. However, the “simple example” he then provides actually shows this is an understatement!

As the field of scientometrics develops and bibliometric studies become more specialised, it may also become more difficult for the non-statistician to understand the research conducted. This is why it is perhaps not a bad idea to keep referring to earlier studies if they are more digestible for the lay person.

A good starter would be this poster presentation (Brody et al., 2004) accompanied with this article (Harnad & Brody, 2004) and with this paper (Hajjem, Harnad, & Gingras, 2005) as the main course. Thankfully all these remain on the menu in Steve Hitchcock’s bibliography (Hitchcock 2004).

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Brody, T., Stamerjohanns, H., Vallières, F., Harnad, S., Gingras, Y., and Oppenheim, C. (2004). The effect of Open Access on citation impact. Paper presented at the National Policies on Open Access (OA) Provision for University Research Output: an International meeting. Southampton, 19 February 2004

Hajjem, C., Harnad, S., and Gingras, Y. (2005). Ten-Year Cross-Disciplinary Comparison of the Growth of Open Access and How it Increases Research Citation Impact. Bulletin of the Technical Committee on Data Engineering, 28(4), 39-46.

Harnad, S., and Brody, T. (2004). Comparing the Impact of Open Access (OA) vs. Non-OA Articles in the Same Journals. D-Lib Magazine, 10(6).

Hitchcock, S. (first posted 15 September 2004). The effect of open access and downloads (‘hits’) on citation impact: a bibliography of studies

: 22 Nov 2007 15:02 |  Tags: Access Advantage Bibliography Citation Evidence Impact Oa Open Open Access Research |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem