The citation advantage of open-access articles

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

Same Question, Different World: Replicating an Open Access Research Impact Study

To examine changes in the open access landscape over time, this study partially replicated Kristin Antelman’s 2004 study of open access citation advantage. Results indicated open access articles still have a citation advantage. For three of the four disciplines examined, the most common sites hosting freely available articles were independent sites, such as academic social networks or article sharing sites. For the same three disciplines, more than 70% of the open access copies were publishers’ PDFs. The major difference from Antelman’s is the increase in the number of freely available articles that appear to be in violation of publisher policies

Manual Evaluation of Robot Performance in Identifying Open Access Articles

Antelman et al. (2005) hand-tested the accuracy of the algorithm that Hajjem et al.'s (2005) software robot used to trawl the web and automatically identify Open Access (OA) and Non-Open-Access (NOA) articles (references derived from the ISI database). Antelman et al. found much lower accuracy than Hajjem et al. Had reported. Hajjem et al. have now re-done the hand-testing on a larger sample (1000) in Biology, and demonstrated that Hajjem et al.'s original estimate of the robot's accuracy was much closer to the correct one. The discrepancy was because both Antelman et al. And Hajjem et al had hand-checked a sample other than the one the robot was sampling. Our present sample, identical with what the robot saw, yielded: d' 2.62, bias 0.68, true OA 93%, false OA 12%. We also checked whether the OA citation advantage (the ratio of the average citation counts for OA articles to the average citation counts for NOA articles in the same journal/issue) was an artifact of false OA: The robot-based OA citation Advantage of OA over NOA for this sample [(OA-NOA)/NOA x 100] was 70%. We partitioned this into the ratio of the citation counts for true (93%) OA articles to the NOA articles versus the ratio of the citation counts for the false (12%) "OA" articles. The "false OA" advantage for this 12% of the articles was 33%, so there is definitely a false OA Advantage bias component in our results. However, the true OA advantage, for 93% of the articles, was 77%. So in fact, we are underestimating the true OA advantage

The citation advantage of open-access articles

This article published was published in the journal, Journal of the American Society for Information Science [© 2008 ASIS&T] and the definitive version is available at: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/10.1002/(ISSN)1532-2890Four 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

The citation advantage of open access articles

Doctoral Thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the award of PhD of Loughborough University.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo

Across all fields, Open Access articles in Swedish repository have a higher citation rate than non-OA articles.

Due to differences in citation practices amongst scientific disciplines, existing research on a possible open access citation advantage remains limited. A new study seeks to overcome these limitations by investigating whether there is a possible OA citation advantage across all fields. Lars Kullman presents his findings on cross-field citation comparisons between OA and non-OA articles from the Chalmers University of Technology self-archive repository. The results indicate an advantage. The OA articles studied in this paper have a 22% higher field normalized citation rate than the non-OA articles

Making research articles freely available can help to negate gender citation effects in political science

Advocates of open access (OA) argue that being freely available gives OA articles a citation advantage over pay-to-access-only articles. Indeed, while results are mixed, available research does tend to support that argument. However, is this advantage enough to overcome other factors that affect individual scholars’ citation rates, such as gender, race, and academic rank? Amy Atchison has conducted research into whether Green OA can counter the gender citation advantage enjoyed by men in political science and results show that self-archiving does significantly help women