ABS: Harter, Impact of Electronic Journals on Scholarly Communication

[Gretchen Whitney]

Harter, Stephen P. "The Impact of Electronic Journals on
Scholarly Communication: A Citation Analysis." The
Public-Access Computer Systems Review 7, no. 5
(1996).

Also: http://info.lib.uh.edu/pr/v7/n5/hart7n5.html

>From the introduction:

"This article reports hard empirical data on the impact of the first wave
of e-journals on the scholarly communities they serve. It assesses the
extent to which scholars and researchers are aware of, are influenced by,
and build their own work upon research published in e-journals. It does
this by examining the artifacts of scholarly communication--the journal
article and the references it makes.

A citation analysis was conducted for 39 scholarly journals that began
electronic publication no later than 1993. Citation data for these
journals were tabulated and analyzed. For journals that publish both print
and electronic versions, citations to articles published prior to parallel
publication were eliminated. The eight most highly cited e-journals were
identified. Citation and publication data for three high ranking
e-journals in the study were compared to similar data for print journals
in the same fields. The seven most highly cited articles from the
e-journals in the study were determined. "