Early citation advantage?

[Stephen J Bensman]

I am totally confused as to what you mean by "gold" versus "green" OA
journals.  Are those some sort of stamps handed out with use like the green
stamps one used to collect with purchases and paste into little books?
There have always problems with the immediacy index due to differences in
frequency of publication.  A journal published weekly has an advantage over
a journal published semi-annually.  The problem is to determine precise
point of publication.  However, the only citation data is readily available
for your problem is the immediacy index, and I am sure you can solve the
point of publication problem by randomizing the sample, etc.   It seems
that your null hypothesis is contained in your statement, "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."  It
is just a question of setting up the data to test.  Harder problems than
that have been solved.

SB




Ian Rowlands <i.rowlands at UCL.AC.UK>@LISTSERV.UTK.EDU> on 06/21/2006
02:31:39 PM

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Subject:    Re: [SIGMETRICS] Early citation advantage?


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
>       <SIGMETRICS at LISTSERV.UTK.EDU>
>
>
> To:    SIGMETRICS at LISTSERV.UTK.EDU
> cc:     (bcc: Stephen J Bensman/notsjb/LSU)
>
> Subject:    [SIGMETRICS] Early citation advantage?
>
> Adminstrative info for SIGMETRICS (for example unsubscribe):
> http://web.utk.edu/~gwhitney/sigmetrics.html
>
> 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