PRC Summary Paper 3

Do Open Access Articles Have Greater Citation Impact? 

A critical review of the literature

Iain D Craig, Wiley-Blackwell

Andrew M Plume, Elsevier

Marie E McVeigh, Thomson Scientific

James Pringle, Thomson Scientific

Mayur Amin, Elsevier

• Summary Paper (Authors' preprint)
• News release (17/05/07)
  

This new, comprehensive review of recent bibliometric literature finds decreasing evidence for a beneficial effect of ‘Open Access’ on article citation rates. The review, now published in the Journal of Informetrics, Volume 1, Issue 3, July 2007, pp 239-248, was proposed by the Publishing Research Consortium. It traces the development of this issue from Lawrence’s original study in Nature in 2001 to the most recent work of Moed and others.

Recent researchers have delved more deeply into such factors as ‘selection bias’ and ‘early view’ effects, and have also begun to control more carefully for the effects of disciplinary differences and publication dates. As they have applied these more sophisticated techniques, the correlation between open access and citation, once thought to be almost self-evident, has almost disappeared.

Note:  A highly relevant article, 'Open Access does not increase citations for research articles from The Astrophysical Journal', by Michael Kurtz and Edwin Henneken, appeared in the ArXiv on 6 September, after the  PRC review was published.

Contents

• Executive Overview
• Introduction
• Methodological issues in citation analysis
• Correlations of online availability and increased citations
• Correlations of Open Access and increased citations
• When should citation counting begin?
• Deconstructing the Open Access citation effect
• What does Open Access mean for individual authors?
• Conclusions
• Acknowledgements
• Glossary