Introduction. Along with the great expansion of research being published in Open Access (OA) journals over the last decade, the interest for analysing the OA literature using informetric methods has also increased. Most studies have focused on the citation impact of OA journals and whether OA publishing increases the chances of a research publication being cited. Fewer analyses, however, have investigated whether OA and non-OA journals in the same research fields are citing the same literature; and to what extent this reflects whether it is the same kind (and thus comparable) research that is published in the two forms of scholarly publications.
Method. The analyses were performed on articles from 45 journals in five different fields: three OA journals, three non-OA and a control set of three more non-OA journals. The citation structures in the journals were analysed through MDS maps building on co-citation analyses, as well as a more thorough comparison investigating overlaps of cited authors and journals between the different journals.
Results. The results are not unambiguous: in biology and biotechnology there are signs of differences of research orientation in-between journals, however not related to whether the journals are OA or non-OA publications; whereas genetics and microbiology show a strong core of journals and authors being cited by all journals. Yet another pattern is found when analysing zoology, where the separation of research areas within the field seems more dependent on whether research was published OA or non-OA.
Conclusions. The results of the analyses suggests that it is hard to draw any overall conclusions on the matter of whether research published in OA journals is likely to have a larger citation impact or not. The differences between research fields are simply too substantial to make any claims on a more general level. It should however be noted that the results should be interpreted with some caution. The subject categories used in the analyses are those of Thomson Reuters’ Journal Citation Reports, a subject classification that is not entirely unproblematic. And at the same time: using journals as basis for field definitions, and the journal selection process in itself, is also related to a set of different problems.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 3/01/2009 03:07:00 PM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
