Countries positioning in open access journals system: An investigation of citation distribution patterns

By their widespread availability and dissemination through open access media, scholarly outputs witness an improved visibility supposed to cause a better citation performance. However, due to the existence of the Matthew effect in science system, which affects users’ perceptions of quality, ultimate effects of the enhanced visibility on different entities are obscure. Moreover, different attitudes towards open access give rise to a more strong quality dynamics in the open access world. Aiming to explore the consequence of the interaction between visibility and quality dynamics, this study investigates countries positioning in open access journals. The results show that the world’s countries welcome open access pattern whether by submitting to or publishing open access journals. A large proportion of the enduring, prestigious open access journals are published by scientifically proficient and developing nations, emphasizing their successful commitment to maintain the undertaken role. The results of the citation analysis highlight national inequalities regarding citation distributions among countries contributing to the journals within the system and within individual disciplines in the system. Well-performing countries mainly consist of advanced ones; however, some lessdeveloped nations are found to perform well in the journal system.     

Article-by-article citation analysis of medical journals

An article by article analysis produced by ISI has been investigated to see whether this form of feedback might be useful to the editors. The data highlight the different roles of two medical journals, which are often regarded as similar. They also allow a parallel examination of the citation pattern of other items besides the standard scientific research articles.     

Scientific potential of European fully open access journals

Scientometrics - The scientific potential of European countries measured by their participation in publication of all peer-review journals as well as open access journals (OAJs) is significant. In...     

Motivations for URL citations to open access library and information science articles

Summary We define the URL citations of a Web page to be the mentions of its URL in the text of other Web pages, whether hyperlinked or not. The proportions of formal and informal scholarly motivations for creating URL citations to Library and Information Science open access journal articles were identified. Five characteristics for each source of URL citations equivalent to formal citations were manually extracted and the relationship between Web and conventional citation counts at the e-journal level was examined. Results of Google searches showed that 282 research articles published in the year 2000 in 15 peer-reviewed LIS open access journals were invoked by 3,045 URL citations. Of these URL citations, 43% were created for formal scholarly reasons equivalent to traditional citations and 18% for informal scholarly reasons. Of the sources of URL citations, 82% were in English, 88% were full text papers and 58% were non-HTML documents. Of the URL citations, 60% were text URLs only and 40% were hyperlinked. About 50% of URL citations were created within one year after the publication of the cited e-article. A slight correlation was found between average numbers of URL citations and average numbers of ISI citations for the journals in 2000. Separating out the citing HTML and non-HTML documents showed that formal scholarly communication trends on the Web were mainly influenced by text URL citations from non-HTML documents.     

Research on impact evaluation of open access journals

Scientometrics - Impact evaluation of open access journals represent how citation indicator and open metric indicators may be affected by open access. Citation indicators and open metric indicators...     

Article processing charge (APC) for publishing open access articles: the Brazilian scenario

The article processing charge (APC) provides economic sustainability for scientific journals that publish in open access (OA). In this work, documents published in OA between 2012 and 2016 by authors with Brazilian affiliation are identified, the profile of these publications is analyzed and the cost of APC is estimated. In order to do so, data from 930 journals and 63,847 documents were collected from the Web of Science Core Collection. It was found that 59% of these documents were published in journals that charge APC. The total expenditures for the 5-year period were estimated at approximately USD 36 million, the weighted average cost per document at USD 957.75 and the average cost per journal at USD 1492.27. The profile of these publications shows that journals indexed by SciELO represent 67% of the 63,847 documents. The use of mega-journals increased over the period, which implies an increase in expenditure in publications, since the average APC per journal was USD 2059.77. It was observed that the OA Brazilian scientific production is characterized by an endogenic profile and has a preference for the Gold road with APC. These results suggest that policies for funding charges are required to stimulate a more international attitude.     

A framework for systematic analysis of open access journals and its application in software engineering and information systems

This article is a contribution towards an understanding of open access (OA) publishing. It proposes an analysis framework of 18 core attributes, divided into the areas of bibliographic information, activity metrics, economics, accessibility, and predatory issues. The framework has been employed in a systematic analysis of 30 OA journals in software engineering (SE) and information systems (IS), which were selected from among 386 OA journals in Computer Science from the Directory of OA Journals. An analysis was performed on the sample of the journals, to provide an overview of the current situation of OA journals in the fields of SE and IS. The journals were then compared between-group, according to the presence of article processing charges. A within-group analysis was performed on the journals requesting article processing charges from authors, in order to understand what is the value added according to different price ranges. This article offers several contributions. It presents an overview of OA definitions and models. It provides an analysis framework born from the observation of data and the existing literature. It raises the need to study OA in the fields of SE and IS while offering a first analysis. Finally, it provides recommendations to readers of OA journals. This paper highlights several concerns still threatening the adoption of OA publishing in the fields of SE and IS. Among them, it is shown that high article processing charges are not sufficiently justified by the publishers, which often lack transparency and may prevent authors from adopting OA.     

Scholarly research in LIS open access electronic journals: A bibliometric study

Using 17 fully open access electronic journals published uninterruptedly during 2000–2004 in the field of Library and Information Science the present study investigated the trend of LIS Open Access e-journals’ literature by analysing articles, authors, institutions, countries, subjects, & references. Quantitative content analysis was carried out on the data, data were analysed in order to project literature growth, authorship pattern, gender pattern, cited references pattern and related bibliometric phenomena. The analysis indicates that there were as many as 1636 articles published during 2000–2004 with an average increment of 23.75 articles per year. The authorship pattern indicates that team research has not been very common in LIS OA publishing and male authors were keener than female authors. Authors from academic institutions were paid more interest in OA publishing and most of them were from developed nations. The subject coverage of these OA e-journals was very vast and almost all facets of information and library science were covered in these articles. There were 90.10% of articles of these e-journals contained references and on an average an article contained 24 references. Of these, 38.53% of references were hyperlinked and 87.35% of hyperlinked references were live during investigation. The analysis of data clearly indicates that OA e-journals in LIS are rapidly establishing themselves as a most viable media for scholarly communication.     

Reception of integrative and complementary medicine (ICM) in scientific journals: a citation and co-word analysis

Even if integrative and complementary medicine (ICM) is a growing scientific field, it is also a highly contested area in terms of scientific legitimacy. The aim of this article is to analyze the reception of ICM research in scientific journals. Is this kind of research acknowledged outside the ICM context, for example, in general or specialized medicine? What is the impact of ICM research? and Is it possible to identify any shift in content, from the original ICM research to the documents where it is acknowledged? The material consisted of two sets: documents published in 12 ICM journals in 2007; and all documents citing these documents during the years 2007–2012. These sets were analyzed with help from citation and co-word analysis. When analyzing the citation pattern, it was clear that a majority of the cited documents were acknowledged in journals and documents that could be related to research areas outside the ICM context, such as pharmacology & pharmacy and plant science—even if the most frequent singular journals and subject categories were connected to ICM. However, after analyzing the content of cited and citing documents, it was striking how similar the content was. It was also evident that much of this research was related to basic preclinical research, in fields such as cell biology, plant pharmacology, and animal experiments.     

Characteristics of papers published in journals: an analysis of open access journals,country of publication,and languages used

This study explores how the citation of open access (OA) journal articles occurs by analyzing the impact of certain journal characteristics, namely, whether the journal is OA and whether its country of publication is the same as the affiliation of a paper’s author. As the language of a paper is an important factor contributing to paper citations, this study uses papers in English. This analysis included publications from 77 countries from 2010 to 2012. This analysis included 19,530 journals and 3,215,742 papers without duplication. The results showed that papers published in OA and international journals were cited in more countries than non-OA and domestic journals, and a higher percentage of these were being cited by foreign countries. From these findings, it was determined that the more widely accessible OA journals were effectively being accessed by researchers from multiple countries. However, of the top 10% most cited papers in international journals, a higher percentage of these came from non-OA compared to OA journals. Among domestic journals, no such difference was found. Papers published in non-OA international journals were most cited in foreign countries with a large number of published papers. Hence, the effect of OA’s expanded accessibility, while having an apparent effect on heightening the interest of foreign readership, has a limited impact in terms of increasing citations.     

Influence of publication languages on the citation rate of scientific articles: A case study of East German journals

In order to quantify the influence of publication languages on the rate of citation of scientific articles, such East German journals from the Science Citation Index database were selected which publish relevant shares of contributions in several languages, especially in English and German. For a fixed period of time (1988) the selective citation impact of both English- and German-language articles was calculated. The results of our investigation reveal a non-uniform picture: In some cases English-language papers exhibit a significantly higher citations-per-paper average than German-language articles, but in a few cases German-language publications achieve a higher mean citation rate. For the half of selected journals there does not exist a statistically significant difference of citation frequencies of publications in both languages. Possible causes of these phenomena (editorial practice of journals, native countries of authors) are considered.     

How should citations to articles in high- and low-impact journals be evaluated,or what is a citation worth?

After a brief discussion on the normalization factors allowing the quantitative comparison between various disciplines, a formula is proposed for taking into account the value of citations to papers published in journals with different impact factors.     

The citation impacts and citation environments of Chinese journals in mathematics

Based on the citation data of journals covered by the China Scientific and Technical Papers and Citations Database (CSTPCD), we obtained aggregated journal-journal citation environments by applying routines developed specifically for this purpose. Local citation impact of journals is defined as the share of the total citations in a local citation environment, which is expressed as a ratio and can be visualized by the size of the nodes. The vertical size of the nodes varies proportionally to a journal’s total citation share, while the horizontal size of the nodes is used to provide citation information after correction for the within-journal (self-) citations. In the “citing” environment, the equivalent of the local citation performance can also be considered as a citation activity index. Using the “citing” patterns as variables one is able to map how the relevant journal environments are perceived by the collective of authors of a journal, while the “cited” environment reflects the impact of journals in a local environment. In this study, we analyze citation impacts of three Chinese journals in mathematics and compare local citation impacts with impact factors. Local citation impacts reflect a journal’s status and function better than (global) impact factors. We also found that authors in Chinese journals prefer international instead of domestic ones as sources for their citations.     

Chinese communication studies: A citation analysis of Chinese communication research in English-language journals

The study employs citation analysis method to identify the disciplines and active research areas in communication studies on communication systems in China. Moreover, the study seeks to contribute to the methodological issues of citation analysis by including new variables in the analysis. Using Chinese communication research in 11 Chinese/Asian studies journals and 13 journalism/communication journals published in English since 1931, the study found that there were little exchanges between Chinese studies and communication scholars. Howerver, the study showed that by including two variables—theme of articles and academic affiliation of authors, the findings can more accurate demonstrate the relationship between the research activities and disciplines cited.     

Indices of journal citation relatedness and citation relationships among aquatic biology journals

Simple quantitative indices of pair-wise journal citation relatedness (based on the numbers of references given to and received from a journal title, which are provided by Science Citation Index database) are translated by an automatic clustering procedure into a meaningful map diagram reflecting topical relatedness of journals within a field of science. Such a map for 60 journals in marine and freshwater biology and related sciences published in 1987 reveals a tight cluster of marine biology journals quite distinct from the freshwater biology journal cluster and from the fisheries cluster. The journals within the marine biology cluster and those with strongest pair-wise links with them can be regarded as the core journals in marine biology. Indices of unilateral citation relatedness are used to obtain diagrams, which we term citograms. The citograms visualize patterns of citation relatedness of a journal (its citing and being cited). Journal self-citation can be meaningfully estimated using the bilateral index of relatedness. Self-citation is high in specialized or regional journal titles. It also appears to be quite substantial in journals of broader scope, which possibly reflect authors' subjective preferences.     

Impact of open access on citation of scholarly publications in the field of civil engineering

The development of science is accompanied by growth of scholarly publications, primarily in the form of articles in peer-reviewed journals. Scientific work is often evaluated through the number of scientific publications in international journals and their citations. This article discusses the impact of open access (OA) on the number of citations for an institution from the field of civil engineering. We analyzed articles, published in 2007 in 14 international journals with impact factor, which are included in the Journal Citation Reports subject category “Civil Engineering”. The influence of open access on the number of citations was analyzed. The aim of our research was to determine if open access articles from the field of civil engineering receive more citations than non-open access articles. Based on the value of impact factor and ranking in quartiles, we also looked at the influence of the rank of journals on the number of citations, separately for OA and Non OA articles, in databases Web of Science (WOS), Scopus and Google Scholar. For 2,026 studied articles we found out that 22 % of them were published as OA articles. They received 29 % of all citations in the observed period. We can conclude by the significance level 5 % or less that in the databases WOS and Scopus the articles from top ranked journals (first quartile) achieved more citations than Non OA articles. This argument can be confirmed for some other journals from second quartile as well, while for the journals ranked into the third quartile it can’t be confirmed. This could be confirmed only partly for journals from the second quartile, and would not be confirmed for journals ranked into the third quartile. This shows that open access is not a sufficient condition for citation, but increases the number of citations for articles published in journals with high impact.     

Measuring the citation impact of research journals in clinical neurology: A structural equation modelling analysis

This study develops and tests an integrated conceptual model of journal evaluation from varying perspectives of citation analysis. The main objective is to obtain a more complete understanding of the external factors affecting journal citation impact; that is, a theoretical construct measured by a number of citation indicators. Structural equation modelling (SEM) with partial least squares (PLS) is used to test the conceptual model with empirical data from journals in clinical neurology. Interrelationships among journal citation impact and four external factors (journal characteristics, journal accessibility, journal visibility and journal internationality) have been successfully explored, and the conceptual model of journal evaluation has been examined. This revised version was published online in June 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Patterns of annual citation of highly cited articles and the prediction of their citation ranking: A comparison across subjects

High citation is associated with research quality and consequently findings on highly cited articles are useful to increase understanding of the factors that produce high quality research. This study explores highly cited articles in six subjects, focusing on late citation and peak citation years. Longitudinal citation patterns were found to be highly varied and, on average, different from the remaining articles in each subject. For four of the six subjects, there is a correlation of over 0.42 between the percentage of early citations and total citation ranking but more highly ranked articles had a lower percentage of early citations. Surprisingly, for highly cited articles in all six subjects the prediction of citation ranking of from the sum of citations during their first six years was less accurate than prediction using the sum of the citations for only the fifth and sixth year.     

Motivations for citation: A comparison of self citation and citation to others

The citation motivations among 51 self citing authors in several natural science disciplines were investigated. Results of a survey on reasons for both self citation and citation to others show that there are very few differences in motivation, and that there are plausible intellectual grounds for those differences which are substantial. Analysis of exposure in text reveals virtually no differences between self citations and citations to others. Analysis of individual disciplines also uncover no substantive differences in either motivation or exposure in text.