Ten-Year Cross-Disciplinary Comparison of the Growth of Open Access and How it Increases Research Citation Impact

By Chawki Hajjem, Stevan Harnad, Yves Gingras. IEEE Data Engineering Bulletin, 2005

362 citations recorded by the source corpus.

In 2001, Lawrence found that articles in computer science that were openly accessible (OA) on the Web were cited substantially more than those that were not. We have since replicated this effect in physics. To further test its cross-disciplinary generality, we used 1,307,038 articles published across 12 years (1992-2003) in 10 disciplines (Biology, Psychology, Sociology, Health, Political Science, Economics, Education, Law, Business, Management). We designed a robot that trawls the Web for full-texts using reference metadata (author, title, journal, etc.) and citation data from the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) database. A preliminary signal-detection analysis of the robot's accuracy yielded a signal detectability d'=2.45 and bias = 0.52. The overall percentage of OA (relative to total OA + NOA) articles varies from 5%-16% (depending on discipline, year and country) and is slowly climbing annually (correlation r=.76, sample size N=12, probability p .90, N=12, p < .0005) and the effect is greater with the more highly cited articles (r = .98, N=6, p < .005). Causality cannot be determined from these data, but our prior finding of a similar pattern in physics, where percent OA is much higher (and even approaches 100% in some subfields), makes it unlikely that the OA citation advantage is merely or mostly a self-selection bias (for making only one's better articles OA). Further research will analyze the effect's timing, causal components and relation to other variables, such as, download counts, journal citation averages, article quality, co-citation measures, hub/authority ranks, growth rate, longevity, and other new impact measures generated by the growing OA database.

Subfields: Artificial Intelligence, Information Systems and Management, Statistics and Probability

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/73810114700f9f8e1bb8635ec966b03b3d5191ca

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Citations in the corpus

How open science helps researchers succeed (2016, background): “Hajjem and colleagues studied over 1.3 million articles published in 10 different disciplines over a 12- year period and found that OA articles had a 36–172% advantage in citations over non-OA articles (Hajjem et al., 2006).”
The Number of Scholarly Documents on the Public Web (2014, result): “It is also worth pointing out that this estimate of 24% for the percentage of publicly accessible scholarly documents is a bit higher than the 15–20% documents estimated to be self-archived [14,15].”
Self-Selected or Mandated, Open Access Increases Citation Impact for Higher Quality Research (2010, methodology): “5 million articles published annually worldwide are being self-archived by their authors today [8,19].”
The state of OA: a large-scale analysis of the prevalence and impact of Open Access articles (2018, neutral): “Особенно интересно исследование [17], в котором для поиска и идентификации документов ОД применялось автоматизированное «прочесывание» Интернета; более ранние исследования основывались на ручной проверке DOAJ, сайтов издателей, Google и Google Scholar (хотя было одно исключение — работа [32]).”
The Access/Impact Problem and the Green and Gold Roads to Open Access: An Update (2008, methodology): “1).(5,10) How did some of the articles in those non-OA journals become OA? Because their authors “self-archived” them on the Web (i.”