Open access articles attract more citations
Like other OA publishers, Frontiers’ makes the results of the latest scientific research freely available to anyone who needs to use them. Obviously, this is good for scientists in developing countries or in institutions with limited access to subscription journals. We also believe OA is the best way of maximizing scientific impact. But where is the evidence?
In 2001, Steve Lawrence published a hugely influential study (1) which showed that OA conference papers in computer science were cited more than twice as often as papers that were not accessible online. But Lawrence’s paper is twenty years old, and his study was limited to one kind of paper in a single discipline. Today, we know far more than in 2001. So the Policy Labs team ran a small-scale study to find out what scholars have found out. We queried Google Scholar for the most highly cited studies of Citation Advantage (see Table below) and analyzed the results (58 papers). Importantly, we did not look for papers supporting our own ideas. Nonetheless, a large majority of studies confirmed the reality of the OA advantage.
● 43/58 studies confirmed the existence of an OA Citation Advantage.
● Recent studies provide stronger evidence of a Citation Advantage than older ones: 66% of papers published between 2001 and 2015, (20/30) confirmed the advantage, rising to 82% (24/28) of papers published between 2016 and 2021.
● The OA Citation Advantage was confirmed for all major disciplinary areas except the physical sciences. The only disciplines where it was not confirmed were Astrophysics and Biodiversity conservation and Economics.
● Among studies targeting specific geographical areas, countries, and institutions, 31/33 confirmed the Citation Advantage
● Small and larger scale studies both confirmed the OA Citation Advantage. The OA Citation Advantage was confirmed regardless of studies’ choice of methodology.
Obviously our study covered only a small part of the large literature on the Citation Advantage and leaves some questions unanswered: for instance, it does not give us enough data to estimate the size of the OA Citation Advantage and It has little to say about the advantages and disadvantages of different forms of OA (gold, green etc.). What is clear, however, is an emerging scholarly consensus that the OA Citation Advantage is very real.
References
(1) Lawrence, S. (2001). Free online availability substantially increases a paper’s impact. Nature, 411(6837), 521–521.
Open Access citation advantage: dataset
To generate this dataset, the authors searched Google Scholar for the 60 most highly ranked journal articles referring to the Open Access Citation Advantage. The search, conducted between May,1, 2021 and May 31, 2021, used the query “Open Access” and (“Citation advantage” OR citations).
The team downloaded all articles that met the following inclusion criteria: the article reported an bibliometric study or an experimental study of the OA Citation Advantage, or a review of such studies, the article compared the citation performance of some kind of OA article against a control group of non-OA articles.
For each article, the team recorded information necessary to characterize the study including the title of the study, the name of the first author, the name of the journal where it appeared, the year of publication and a link to the original article. Other information recorded included the main focus of the article, the disciplinary area and disciplines covered, the countries and institutions studied, the methodology used, a summary of the conclusions,and whether or not the study confirmed the OA citation advantage.
These pages present a summary of the data. The full consolidated dataset can be downloaded here.
The survey was conceived and led by Richard Walker, with the collaboration of Cho Enriquez (team lead), Joseph Rasalan, and Nathan Afalla.
