Early citation advantage?

[Pikas, Christina K.]

Interesting topic.  I have a few comments:
1) Would you have to control on subject?  Math journals which have
citation half lives of >10 should not be compared to say biomed
journals.
2) In fact, would you want to keep "letters" journals separate from the
more slow to publish?  So if you were looking at optics, I believe
Optics Express (open access 62-day turnaround journal from OSA) is there
in the JCR list with Physics Review A.  I'm not sure comparing the
immediacy of the two is fair.
3) How do you handle the many examples of journals that make articles
available months before the issue is released?  You might see an article
with a citation to a 2007 volume that's posted on the ejournal site.
There's the problem, too, of citing forthcoming articles and deduping
them with the published version.

I think the e-mail that I just received addresses these points, but I'm
going to go ahead recklessly and send ...


Christina K. Pikas, MLS
R.E. Gibson Library & Information Center
The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory
Voice  240.228.4812 (Washington), 443.778.4812 (Baltimore)
Fax 443.778.5353



-----Original Message-----
From: ASIS&T Special Interest Group on Metrics
[mailto:SIGMETRICS at LISTSERV.UTK.EDU] On Behalf Of Stephen J Bensman
Sent: Wednesday, June 21, 2006 3:08 PM
To: SIGMETRICS at LISTSERV.UTK.EDU
Subject: Re: [SIGMETRICS] Early citation advantage?


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

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Subject:    [SIGMETRICS] Early citation advantage?


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