Does Open Access Increase Authors' Citation Rates

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Does Open Access Increase Authors' Citation
Rates?
Kristin Antelman April 28, 2005
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Citations and impact

• Journal impact factors
• Article impact factor
• Impact factor as measurement for two roads to
  OA journals and articles

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Report on a study of OA practice and impact

• Question Do articles have a greater impact, as
  measured by citations, if they are open access?

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Methodology

• Sampled articles from top journals in philosophy,
  political science, electrical and electronic
  engineering, and mathematics
• Why these subjects?
• Why top journals?
• Years sampled

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Methodology

• Searched article title in Google to see if
  article is freely available
• Coded each open or not open
• Recorded number of citations to each
• Compared means within each discipline tested
  for significance

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Findings
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Citation difference vs. OA adoption
OA adoption 1. mathematics (69) 2. engineering
(37) 3. political science (29) 4. philosophy
(17)
citation difference 1. mathematics (91) 2.
political science (86) 3. engineering (51) 4.
philosophy (45)
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Discipline snapshotsphilosophy
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Discipline snapshotsengineering
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Discipline snapshotspolitical science
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Discipline snapshotsmathematics
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Of OA articles, what is pre/postprint
distribution?
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Where are the OA articles?
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Impressions

• Google
• open copy tends toward the top
• publishers expose article-level metadata through
  multiple channels
• links on personal webpages hit and miss
• some formats hit and miss

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Measurement challenges

• Old complexities versions, post date
• New complexity embargoed content from publishers

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Why are citation ratesgreater for OA?

• citation advantageQB EA OA
• QBQuality Bias
• EAEarly Advantage
• OAOpen Access Advantage
• Other possible variables
• discipline practices
• of authors on paper

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Why do we care why?

• Advocacy
• Bolster or challenge statements
• Understand scholarly communication practices (in
  particular, appreciate differences between
  disciplines)
• Develop services

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Research fronts

• Look at more disciplines
• Quantify causes of increased citations
• Experiment with other citation metrics
• correlation between downloads and citation (reads
  and citation)
• GoogleScholar
• Citeseer

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Final thoughts

• There is a lot to be learned from author behavior
• Disciplines and sub-disciplines are distinct
  organisms
• OA may be a slow moving train, but it is moving

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thank you