Value of article per citation

[Stevan Harnad]

Dear David & Terry,

In "Efficiency, Journal Publishing and Scholarly Research"
http://web.middlebury.edu/NR/rdonlyres/A94D7223-2A21-4554-9C5C-7B4FA4D66B9C/0/0414.pdf

you wrote:

    "The value of a publication to an academic has been studied by
    economists, and estimated at $500 per article, and -per citation."

I would be very grateful if you could let me know what the estimate is
per citation, and where the source is for this analysis. M co-authors and
I would like to use it in a paper we are writing on the degree to which
self-archiving an article on the web, thereby making it openly accessible
to all users, increases its citation count. We would like to translate
this citation increase into an estimate of the extra dollars to the author
(via both research funding, or employment/salary/promotion/tenure):

    http://opcit.eprints.org/oacitation-biblio.html

You may be interested in estimating value per citation for UK
Funding. This can be done, for each discipline, across universities,
using the 2001 RAE returns, which can be translated directly into pounds
sterling of top-sliced research funding, per department and institution,
according to its RAE rank and the number of researchers submitted.

    http://www.hero.ac.uk/rae/

The RAE ranks, in turn, turn out to be highly correlated with the total
citation counts for the researchers submitted:

    Smith, Andrew, & Eysenck, Michael (2002) "The correlation between RAE
    ratings and citation counts in psychology," June 2002
    http://psyserver.pc.rhbnc.ac.uk/citations.pdf

    Holmes, Alison & Oppenheim, Charles (2001) Use of citation analysis
    to predict the outcome of the 2001 Research Assessment Exercise for
    Unit of Assessment (UoA) 61: Library and Information Management.
    http://www.shef.ac.uk/~is/publications/infres/paper103.html

Best wishes,

Stevan Harnad
Professor of Cognitive Science
Department of Electronics and Computer Science
University of Southampton
Highfield, Southampton
SO17 1BJ UNITED KINGDOM
phone: +44 23-80 592-388
fax:   +44 23-80 592-865
harnad at ecs.soton.ac.uk
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/