Open Access News

News from the open access movement


Saturday, August 18, 2007

More on citation impact of OA journals

Hajar Sotudeh and Abbas Horri, The citation performance of open access journals: A disciplinary investigation of citation distribution models, Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, August 17, 2007.  Not even an abstract is free online, at least so far.

Update. Thanks to Tom Wilson for sending me an excerpt, from which I've pulled these snippets:

...[C]itations to OA articles increase at a faster rate relative to the increase in publication of OA articles, although this rate is slower than that previously reported for the world science system....

Finally, our results at the individual and global level suggest that almost half of the fields exceed or equal their expected citation rates compared to non-OA journals. The first global rank is occupied by Life Sciences, followed by the Natural Sciences and Engineering and Material Sciences in second and third positions, respectively. Medical and Health Sciences, Physics, and Chemistry are, respectively, the best known subdisciplines of Life Sciences and the Natural Sciences, enjoying a long reputation in embracing the OA model. Medical communities have taken quickly to OAJ publishing, whereas physicists and chemists traditionally show a higher tendency towards preprint dissemination and subject repositories, respectively. According to our results, Medical and Health Sciences is the best performing subdiscipline. There are many medical fields positioned among the highest ranked ones. Having a long and widespread tradition of supporting OAJs, their success is not unexpected....Despite [some] concerns [about the quality of OA articles in medicine], the citation findings show a wide embrace of OA articles in the discipline....