Early citation advantage?

[Phil Davis]

In our study of math articles deposited in the arXiv, we could not detect
an Early View advantage.  Mathematics articles have very long citation
half-lives and don't get cited nearly as often as biomedical articles, so
the effect may be there, but just not detectable in our dataset.  There
were stronger explanatory variables to explain the citation advantage. See:

Does the arXiv lead to higher citations and reduced publisher downloads for
mathematics articles?
Philip M. Davis and Michael J. Fromerth
Scientometrics (2007 forthcoming) http://arxiv.org/pdf/cs.DL/0603056

An analysis of 2,765 articles published in four math journals from 1997 to
2005 indicated that articles deposited in the arXiv received 35% more
citations on average than non-deposited articles (an advantage of about 1.1
citations per article), and that this difference was most pronounced for
highly-cited articles. The most plausible explanation is not Open Access or
Early View, but Self-Selection, which has led to higher quality articles
being deposited in the arXiv. Yet in spite of their citation advantage,
arXiv-deposited articles received 23% fewer downloads from the publisher's
website (about 10 fewer downloads per article) in all but the most recent
two years after publication. The data suggest that arXiv and the
publisher's website may be fulfilling distinct functional needs of the reader.

--Phil Davis