Early citation advantage?

[Ian Rowlands]

Thanks for that Stephen, I guess, having thought about it a bit more
that there
are semantic problems here.  In the case of a gold OA journal vs a traditional
tolled journal, I would be hard pressed to see a plausible cause and
effect for
an early OA citation advantage. If anyone could advise on this I would be very
grateful.

Perhaps this is an issue specific to the green OA route.  If I finish a paper
today and seek publication through a traditional tolled journal and take no
further action, I might well expect to see it published and date stamped in
2007.  If I self- or institutionally archive the preprint, that version would
be date stamped today, 2006.  That version might well be cited, giving me an
apparent advantage over peers in the same issue who did not archive.  This
might explain the claimed temporal advantage.

It might also be an argument FOR PUBLISHERS to encourage self-archiving
to help
to up their ISI immediacy index (but it would only work in cases where the
formal publication happened to fall in the next calendar year).

Certainly your suggestion of comparing immediacy indexes for sets of (gold) IA
and tolled articles would be very interesting.

Ian

Quoting Stephen J Bensman <notsjb at LSU.EDU>:

> Adminstrative info for SIGMETRICS (for example unsubscribe):
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> If you can define a large enough subject set covered by the SCI or SSCI JCR
> and containing large enough subsets of both "tolled access" journals and
> "open access" journals, I would suggest some sort of comparison of means
> test on the immediacy indexes of the two subsets.
>
> SB
>
>
>
>
> Ian Rowlands <i.rowlands at UCL.AC.UK>@LISTSERV.UTK.EDU> on 06/21/2006
> 01:17:24 PM
>
> Please respond to ASIS&T Special Interest Group on Metrics
>       <SIGMETRICS at LISTSERV.UTK.EDU>
>
> Sent by:    ASIS&T Special Interest Group on Metrics
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> To:    SIGMETRICS at LISTSERV.UTK.EDU
> cc:     (bcc: Stephen J Bensman/notsjb/LSU)
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> Subject:    [SIGMETRICS] Early citation advantage?
>
> Adminstrative info for SIGMETRICS (for example unsubscribe):
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> Several recent studies (e.g. Thomson Scientific, Eysenbach) have indicated
> that
> open access articles are more likely to be cited sooner than tolled access
> articles.  This is an argument that, on the face of it, provides a powerful
> argument for open access: it speeds up scientific workflow.  Can anyone
> supply
> a testable hypothesis for this?  I can quite easily understand how open
> access
> leads to MOPE use, thus higher citation.  But speedier citation?  What are
> the
> plausible cause and effect arguments here?
>
> Ian Rowlands
> UCL Centre for Publishing
> www.publishing.ucl.ac.uk
>



Dr Ian Rowlands
Director of Research, UCL Centre for Publishing
www.publishing.ucl.ac.uk