Reconsidering the gold open access citation advantage postulate in a multidisciplinary context: an analysis of the subject categories in the Web of Science database 2009–2014

Since Lawrence in 2001 proposed the open access (OA) citation advantage, the potential benefit of OA in relation to citation impact has been discussed in depth. The methodology to test this postulate ranges from comparing the impact factors of OA journals versus traditional ones, to comparing citations of OA versus non-OA articles published in the same non-OA journals. However, conclusions are not entirely consistent among fields, and two possible explications have been suggested in those fields where a citation advantage has been observed for OA: the early view and the selection bias postulates. In this study, a longitudinal and multidisciplinary analysis of gold OA citation advantage is developed. All research articles in all journals for all subject categories in the multidisciplinary database Web of Science are considered. A total of 1,138,392 articles—60,566 (5.3%) OA articles and 1,077,826 (94.7%) non-OA articles—published in 2009 are analysed. The citation window considered goes from 2009 to 2014, and data are aggregated for the 249 disciplines (subject categories). At journal level, we also study the evolution of journal impact factors for OA and non-OA journals in those disciplines whose OA prevalence is higher (top 36 subject categories). As the main conclusion, there is no generalizable gold OA citation advantage, neither at article nor at journal level.     

Do lead articles signal higher quality in the digital age? Evidence from finance journals

Citations are regarded as measures of quality yet citation rates vary widely within each of the top finance journals. Since article ordering is at the discretion of editors, lead articles can be interpreted as signals of quality that academics can use to allocate their attention and assert the value of their publications. Advances in electronic journal access allow researchers to directly access articles, suggesting article ordering may be less relevant today. We confirm the past importance of lead articles by examining citation rates from published papers as well as the wider source of papers that are listed in Google Scholar. Our findings also confirm using Google Scholar as a citation source provides congruent results to using citations from articles published in ISI-listed journals, with the additional benefit of it potentially being more timely since it includes wider citation sources, inclusive of working and conference papers.     

The citation impact of social sciences and humanities upon patentable technology

This paper examines the citation impact of papers published in scientific-scholarly journals upon patentable technology, as reflected in examiner- or inventor-given references in granted patents. It analyses data created by SCImago Research Group, linking PATSTAT’s scientific non-patent references (SNPRs) to source documents indexed in Scopus. The frequency of patent citations to journal papers is calculated per discipline, year, institutional sector, journal subject category, and for “top” journals. PATSTAT/Scopus-based statistics are compared to those derived from Web of Science/USPTO linkage. A detailed assessment is presented of the technological impact of research publications in social sciences and humanities (SSH). Several subject fields perform well in terms of the number of citations from patents, especially Library and Information Science, Language and Linguistics, Education, and Law, but many of the most cited journals find themselves in the interface between SSH and biomedical or natural sciences. Analyses of the titles of citing patents and cited papers are presented that shed light upon the cognitive content of patent citations. It is proposed to develop more advanced indicators of citation impact of papers upon patents, and ways to combine citation counts with citation content and context analysis.

     

Analysis of the influence of the two types of the journal articles; theoretical and empirical on the impact factor of a journal

The study discusses the necessity to analyze the influence of theoretical and empirical types of journal articles on the citation impact of Spanish psychology journals. Three of the most representative Spanish psychology journals were selected for the purposes of this study: Papeles del Psicólogo, Análisis y Modificación de Conducta and Psicothema. Twenty-three psychology journals in Spanish were used as source journals. Altogether, there were sixty-seven issues reviewed for the references and ninety-three issues for the articles. The bibliometricanalysis was conducted by six highly trained psychologists. The results demonstrated differences regarding the percentages of empirical and theoretical articles published in the three examined journals and the number of citations received by them based on the article type. When normalizing the results according to the number of theoretical and empirical articles that were published, it becomes evident that the theoretical articles receive on average twice as many references as the empirical ones. We discuss the importance of this effect on the comparison of journals based on their citation impact and show the evidence that it is only valid to compare journals which publish a similar percentage of theoretical and empirical articles.     

Characteristics and impact of grant-funded research: a case study of the library and information science field

This paper reports on a bibliometric study of the characteristics and impact of research in the library and information science (LIS) field which was funded through research grant programs, and compares it with research that received no extra funding. Seven core LIS journals were examined to identify articles published in 1998 that acknowledge research grant funding. The distribution of these articles by various criteria (e.g., topic, affiliation, funding agency) was determined. Their impact as indicated by citation counts during 1998–2008 was evaluated against that of articles without acknowledging extra funding and published in the same journals in the same year using citation data collected from Scopus’ Citation Tracker. The impact of grant-funded research as measured by citation counts was substantially higher than that of other research, both overall and in each journal individually. Scholars from outside LIS core institutions contributed heavily to grant-funded research. The two highest-impact publications by far reported non-grant-based research, and grant-based funding of research reported in core LIS journals was biased towards the information retrieval (IR) area, particularly towards research on IR systems. The percentage of articles reporting grant-funded research was substantially higher in information-oriented journals than in library-focused ones.     

An impact of Croatian journals measured by citation analysis from SCI-expanded database in time span 1975–2001

The aim of this research is to gain an insight into international recognition of the STM (Science, Technology, and Medicine) Croatian journals measured by citations in SCI-expanded database. The sample for the research was a citation analysis of 142 journals in time span 1975–2001 for papers published in 1975–1998. More than 90% of those journals are not indexed by SCI-expanded. For the purpose of this research we introduced a new scientometric indicator Normalized number of Citations per 100 Papers (NCP) that allows us direct comparison of the journals from various categories (NCP = 100C/P / IF₁₉₈₉). We chose the year 1989 as a mean value for time span 1975–2001. By citation analysis we established the influence of errors on recognition of Croatian journals and their articles. Obtained results show that an article-to-article link is not found for 32% of cited items. The most frequent type of error is journal title, 37%, which indicates that approximately one third of Croatian journals can not be found when searching by journal title only. Some Croatian journals, even not indexed by SCI-expanded, showed relatively high rank in an impact, i.e. their NCP is higher than 100, and number of citations per paper is higher than 1.     

Difficulties and challenges of Chinese scientific journals: Statistical analysis of Chinese literatures using Chinese Science Bulletin as example

Using statistical method, the author analyzed the citation rate of articles published in Chinese Science Bulletin (CSB) between 1995 and 1999 in Science Citation Index Expanded (SCIE) databases. Results indicated that: 1. Majority of authors who published in CSB were Chinese; 2. The articles were basically cited by the authors themselves in the first year after publication; 3. The peak of total citation rate appeared in the third year after publication and the peak of non-self-citation rate was further delayed. There are relatively high self-citation rates of articles from CSB and most of these citations are from Chinese scientific journals. This indicates that our citation environment is limited to a closed circle. The author, therefore, proposed a strategy for changing the current conditions of Chinese scientific journals to raise their influence. This revised version was published online in August 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Croatian scientific publications in top journals according to the Science Citation Indexfor the 1980–2000 Period

A top journal is defined as a journal which is within the first 10% of journals ranked by impact factor in the SCI list, within a particular scientific subfield, for the year considered. Journals which were for 11 or more years within the first 10% were considered top journals during the whole period even though they were not within the first 10%, in some of the years covered by this study.In the period from 1980 to 2000, the Croatian scientists affiliated with research institutions within the Republic of Croatia, published a total of 13,021 papers in journals covered by the Science Citation Index (SCI). Out of these papers, only 2,720 were published in top journals. This amounts to 20.9% of the total, and this is below the world average of 29.5% for the same scientific subfields. Out of the above 2,720 publications, 1,250 (46.0%) were published in international collaboration, and 335 (12.3%) papers were Meeting Abstracts. The Croatian scientists were most productive in the main scientific fields: Physics (875 papers; 32.2%), Medicine (786 papers; 28.9%), and Chemistry (580 papers; 21.3%). All others fields, taken together, comprised 17.6% of the total scientific output. Of the 786 medical papers, 290 were Meeting Abstracts, or 36.9% of the total output in the field of Medicine, and medical Meeting Abstracts represent 86.6% of the total number of abstracts (335). Articles (2,060) represent 75.7% of the total Croatian scientific output in top journals. This revised version was published online in June 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Article-count impact factor of materials science journals in SCI database

This article proposed a new index, so-called “Article-Count Impact Factor” (ACIF) for evaluating journal quality in light of citation behaviour in comparison with the ISI journal impact factors. The ACIF index was the ratio of the number of articles that were cited in the current year to the source items published in that journal during the previous two years. In this work, we used 171 journal titles in materials categories published in the years of 2001–2004 in international journals indexed in the Science Citation Index Expanded (SCI) database as data source. It was found that ACIF index could be used as an alternative tool in assessing the journal quality, particularly in the case where the assessed journals had the same (equal or similar) JIF values. The experimental results suggested that the higher the ACIF value, the more the number of articles being cited. The changes in ACIF values were more dependent on the JIF values rather than the total number of articles. Polymer Science had the greatest ACIF values, suggesting that the articles in Polymer Science had greater “citation per article” than those in Metallurgical Engineering and Ceramics. It was also suggested that in order to increase a JIF value of 1.000, Ceramics category required more articles to be cited as compared to Metallurgical Engineering and Polymer Science categories.     

Fish science research in China: How does it compare with fish research in India?

Fish and aquaculture research in the People's Republic of China over the six years 1994-1999 has been mapped using data from six databases– three abstracting services and three citation indexes. The results are compared with fish science research in India. During the six years China has published 2035 papers (roughly 4.5 –5% of the world output) and India 2454. More than 95% of China's papers are journal articles, compared to 82.8% of Indian papers. About 78% of China's journal paper output has appeared in 143 domestic journals compared to 70% from India in 113 Indian journals. Less than one-eighth of the journal articles published by Chinese researchers are published in journals indexed in SCI, compared to 30% of journal articles by Indian researchers. Less than a dozen papers from each of these countries have appeared in journals of impact factor greater than 3.0. Fish research institutes and fishery colleges are the major contributors of the Chinese research output in this area. In India academic institutions are the leading contributors (61%), followed by central government institutions (>25%). Qingdao, Wuhan, Beijing and Shanghai are the cities and Shandong, Hubei and Fujian are the provinces contributing a large number of papers. As we do not have addresses of all authors in most of the papers, we are unable to estimate the extent of international collaboration. Although China's research output and its citation impact are less than those of India, China's fish production and export earnings are far higher than those of India. Probably China is better at bridging the gap between knowhow (research) and do-how (technology and creation of employment and wealth). China is pretty strong in extension. This revised version was published online in June 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

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.     

A deductive approach to select or rank journals in multifaceted subject, Oceanography

Whether singleton approach (citation analysis of identified source journals) used by Gross and Gross (Science 66(1713):385?C389, 1927) or differential approach (citation analysis of articles in specific subject field) applied by Bradford (Engineering 137:85?C86, 1934) suitable to select or rank journals in multifaceted subject????Oceanography?? is presented. This study discusses both the approaches analyzing citations of published literature in oceanography from 30 countries. The ranking correlation of journals showed better positive correlation (lowest ???=?0.662 for 2005?C2009 to highest ???=?0.817 for 1995?C1999) when top ranked journals from the list generated complying Gross and Gross approach (GA) were correlated with same journal titles of the list generated complying Bradford approach than the other way (lowest ???=?0.588 for 2005?C2009 to highest ???=?0.726 for 1990?C1994). Both the approaches matched similar number of journals to country-wise lists and give unbiased choice in preferring a ranking list. The journals distribution graphs showed typical Bradford?CLeimkuhler curves in both the approaches for all the datasets. But the groos droop appears comparatively early with shorter straight line in GA. The high clustering of literature to limited number of journals is a disadvantage in multifaceted subject. So the differential approach used by Bradford is being considered suitable for multifaceted subject like, ??Oceanography??.     

Global knowledge management research: A bibliometric analysis

The present study characterizes the dynamic publication activity of global knowledge management (KM) by data collected through a search restricted to articles in ISI Web of Science.A total of 2727 unique authors had contributed 1407 publications since 1975. The overwhelming majority (2349 or 86%) of them wrote one publication. The productive authors, their contribution and authorship position are listed to indicate their productivity and degree of involvement in their research publications. The sum of research output of the first or responsible authors from USA, UK and Germany reaches 57% of the total productivity. The distribution of articles is rather widespread - they published in 462 titles of serials, spanning 110 Journal Citation Reports subject categories. The higher quality journals make publication of findings more visible. A Pearson's correlation coefficient is statistically found to be significant between citation frequency of article and impact factor of journal, instead of authorship pattern. The results also indicate that R&D expenditures were actually not proportional to research productivity or citation counts. As the subject highly interacts with other disciplines, the field of KM has not yet developed its own body of literature. KM might have been evolving an interdisciplinary theory that is developing at the boundaries of scientific disciplines. This revised version was published online in June 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

The most highly cited Library and Information Science articles: Interdisciplinarity,first authors and citation patterns

Highly cited articles are interesting because of the potential association between high citation counts and high quality research. This study investigates the 82 most highly cited Information Science and Library Science’ (IS&LS) articles (the top 0.1%) in the Web of Science from the perspectives of disciplinarity, annual citation patterns, and first author citation profiles. First, the relative frequency of these 82 articles was much lower for articles solely in IS&LS than for those in IS&LS and at least one other subject, suggesting that that the promotion of interdisciplinary research in IS&LS may be conducive to improving research quality. Second, two thirds of the first authors had an h-index in IS&LS of less than eight, show that much significant research is produced by researchers without a high overall IS&LS research productivity. Third, there is a moderate correlation (0.46) between citation ranking and the number of years between peak year and year of publication. This indicates that high quality ideas and methods in IS&LS often are deployed many years after being published.     

Publication structures and accumulative advantages

The paper examines the role played by the scientific journal in the citation process. It compares characteristics of journals which publish the articles cited and those which cite them. It pays attention to the regional location, degrees of specialization, and visibility of journals and investigates how these factors relate to accumulation of citations. The data consist of a subsample of Nordic cardiovascular research articles, published in 1981, and of the articles citing them until early 1988.     

Citation patterns in the Kuwaiti journal Medical Principles and Practice: The first 12 years, 1989-2000

This study investigates the citation patterns in the journal, Medical Principles and Practice from its inception in 1989 through 2000 (volumes 1-9). The data set includes 4740 references appended to the 221 original research articles. All of the citations were entered into a ProCite database for analysis. Specifically, this study addresses: (1) bibliometric patterns of cited works in terms of publication format, subject scatter, authorship characteristics, age of citations, geographic distribution, and language distribution; (2) productivity of journal titles; (3) the role of self-citation; and (4) how selected bibliometric indicators apply. Some of the findings include: journal articles are most frequently cited; English language publications dominate the literature; there is a trend of multiple authorship; and the pattern of aging is below the norm for medical literature. The results of the study can provide a benchmark to measure the user behavior of a particular group of researchers as well as for the provision of collection development and management decisions. This revised version was published online in August 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Trends in and contributions to entrepreneurship research: a broad review of literature from 1996 to June 2012

This article, which began as an effort to gauge trends in and contributions to the broad field of “entrepreneur/entrepreneurship,” reviews 5,476 academic articles on entrepreneurship that were published in 522 Social Sciences Citation Index and Science Citation Index journals from 1996 to June 2012. This survey identifies keywords and conducts a review to search for and identify related articles in the Institute for Scientific Information Web of Science database. We then present our findings, including the number of publications by year, categorization of article types, main academic journals, authors, and most-cited articles. The citation counts for authors, journals, and articles are also analyzed. This study indicates that the number of articles related to the keyword entrepreneur increased from 1996 to the end of 2011, which is a sign of an upward trend in the influence of entrepreneurs. Entrepreneur research fascinated numerous scholars during the study period covering 16.5 years. In particular, researchers from the USA, England, Canada, Germany, and the Netherlands have made the most contributions to this field. This literature review provides evidence that the concept of entrepreneur attracted academic researchers, resulting in significant contributions to the field of entrepreneur research.     

Research output analysis of municipal solid waste: a case study of China

Municipal solid waste (MSW) management in China draws particular attention as China has become the largest MSW generator in the world. The paper analyzed the growth and development of MSW research productivity in China in terms of publication output as reflected in science citation index for the period 1997–2011. The study revealed that the output of MSW research in China has rapidly increased over the 15 years in contrast with USA. Chinese authors contributed 730 publications out of which 708 were journal articles, 17 reviews, 3 editorial materials, 1 correction and 1 meeting abstract, from 421 institutions. About 13.70 % of publications were contributed by Chinese Academy of Sciences, followed by Tongji University, Shanghai (13.15) and Tsinghua University, Beijing (11.10 %). That impact factors of the top 20 journals publishing most papers were between 0.30 and 4.63. Leading 20 authors in the area of MSW research published at least 13 articles per person. The annual share of publications varied from 0.27 to 20.96 % per year. The share was highest in the year 2009 at 20.96 %. An analysis of the title-words showed that “landfill”, “incineration” and “management” were recent major topics of municipal solid waste research in China. The results could help researchers understand the characteristics of research output and search hot spots of MSW field in China.     

The journal relative impact: an indicator for journal assessment

This paper presents the journal relative impact (JRI), an indicator for scientific evaluation of journals. The JRI considers in its calculation the different culture of citations presented by the Web of Science subject categories. The JRI is calculated considering a variable citation window. This citation window is defined taking into account the time required by each subject category for the maturation of citations. The type of document considered in each subject category depends on its outputs in relation to the citations. The scientific performance of each journal in relation to each subject category that it belongs to is considered allowing the comparison of the scientific performance of journals from different fields. The results obtained show that the JRI can be used for the assessment of the scientific performance of a given journal and that the SJR and SNIP should be used to complement the information provided by the JRI. The JRI presents good features as stability over time and predictability.