Free online availability substantially increases a paper's impact

By Steve Lawrence. Nature, 2001

820 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Here we investigate the impact of free online availability by analysing citation rates. Online availability of an article may not greatly improve access and impact without efficient and comprehensive search services; a substantial percentage of the literature needs to be indexed by these search services before scientists consider them useful. In computer science, a substantial percentage of the literature is online and available through search engines such as Google , or specialized services such as ResearchIndex � although the greatest impact of online availability is yet to come, because comprehensive search services and more powerful search methods have become available only recently.

Subfields: Information Systems, Information Systems and Management

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/10531ff3245d722ac4dd8304a70580b3189c5007

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Citations in the corpus

How open science helps researchers succeed (2016, background): “DOI: 10.7554/eLife.16800.001 ERIN C MCKIERNAN*, PHILIP E BOURNE, C TITUS BROWN, STUART BUCK, AMYE KENALL, JENNIFER LIN, DAMON MCDOUGALL, BRIAN A NOSEK, KARTHIK RAM, COURTNEY K SODERBERG, JEFFREY R SPIES, KAITLIN THANEY, ANDREW UPDEGROVE, KARA H WOO AND TAL YARKONI”
Self-Selected or Mandated, Open Access Increases Citation Impact for Higher Quality Research (2010, background): “This “OA Impact Advantage” has been found in all fields analyzed so far -- physical, technological, biological and social sciences, and humanities (Lawrence 2001; Brody & Harnad 2004; Hajjem et al. 2005; Moed 2005b; Eysenbach 2006; Giles et al. 1998; Kurtz & Brody, 2006; Norris et al. 2008; Evans 20”
What do citation counts measure? A review of studies on citing behavior (2008, background): “Physical accessibility (Soper, 1976), free online availability of publications (Lawrence, 2001), and the publishing media (Silverman, 1985) influence the probability of citations.”
Proportion of Open Access Papers Published in Peer-Reviewed Journals at the European and World Levels—1996-2013 (2014, methodology): “The initial interest in the use of bibliometric methods in OA measurement focused on accessing the so-called citation advantage of OA2 as opposed to subscription-based journals (Lawrence, 2001; Antelman, 2004; Harnad & Brody, 2004; Craig, 2007).”
Participation in the global knowledge commons: challenges and opportunities for research dissemination in developing countries (2005, background): “In a highly cited study, Lawrence (2001) found an “average of 336 per cent more citations of online articles compared to offline articles published in the same venue”.”
Open access publishing, article downloads, and citations: randomised controlled trial (2008, background): “In 2001 it was first reported that freely available online science proceedings garnered more than three times the average number of citations received by print articles.”