Citation impact

Citation is the process of acknowledging or citing the author, year, title, and locus of publication (journal, book, or other) of a source used in a published work. Such citations can be counted as measures of the usage and impact of the cited work. This is called citation analysis or bibliometrics. Among the measures that have emerged from citation analysis are the citation count for

• an individual article (how often it was cited);
• an author (total citations, or average citation count per article);
• for a journal (journal impact factor, or the average citation count for the articles in the journal).

While citation counts are often correlated with other measures with scholarly and scientific performance, causal statements linking a citation advantage with open access status are premature and are often contradicted by rigorous experimental and observational studies.

There also exists an H-index measure of an individual scientist's impact and citation record.

See also

• Journal Impact Factor, the average citation count for a journal
• Citation index
• H-index
• Eigenfactor

References

(See also the Bibliography of Findings on the Open Access Impact Advantage)

Bollen, J., Van de Sompel, H., Smith, J. and Luce, R. (2005) Toward alternative metrics of journal impact: A comparison of download and citation data Information Processing and Management, 41(6): 1419-1440

Brody, T. and Harnad, S. (2004) Comparing the Impact of Open Access (OA) vs. Non-OA Articles in the Same Journals D-Lib Magazine 10(6).

Brody, T., Harnad, S. and Carr, L. (2005) Earlier Web Usage Statistics as Predictors of Later Citation Impact Journal of the American Association for Information Science and Technology (JASIST).

Davis, P. M., Lewenstein, B. V., Simon, D. H., Booth, J. G., & Connolly, M. J. L. (2008). Open access publishing, article downloads and citations: randomised trial. BMJ, 337, a568-.

Chanson, Hubert (2008). Digital Publishing, Ethics and Hydraulic Engineering: the Elusive or "Boring" Bore? Proceedings of 2nd International Junior Researcher and Engineer Workshop on Hydraulic Structures (IJREW'08), 30 July-1 Aug. 2008, Pisa, Italy, S. Pagliara Editor, Edizioni Plus, Università di Pisa, Keynote lecture, pp. 3-13 (ISBN 978-88-8492-568-8).

Chanson, Hubert (2007). Research Quality, Publications and Impact in Civil Engineering into the 21st Century. Publish or Perish, Commercial versus Open Access, Internet versus Libraries ? Canadian Journal of Civil Engineering, NRC, Vol. 34, No. 8, pp. 946-951 (DOI:10.1169/L07-027) (ISSN 0315-1468).

Eysenbach G. (2006a) Citation Advantage of Open Access Articles. PLoS Biol. 2006;4(5) p. e157. Shows the Open Access citation advantage over non-Open Access papers, as well as a gold-OA over green-OA citation advantage. in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) Eysenbach G (2006b) . The Open Access Advantage. J Med Internet Res 2006;8(2):e8 Some follow-up data to the Eysenbach PLoS Biol study

Garfield, E. (1955) Citation Indexes for Science: A New Dimension in Documentation through Association of Ideas. Science, Vol:122, No:3159, p. 108-111

Garfield, E. (1973) Citation Frequency as a Measure of Research Activity and Performance in Essays of an Information Scientist, 1: 406-408, 1962-73, Current Contents, 5

Garfield, E. (1988) Can Researchers Bank on Citation Analysis? Current Comments, No. 44, October 31, 1988

Garfield, E. (1998) The use of journal impact factors and citation analysis in the evaluation of science. 41st Annual Meeting of the Council of Biology Editors, Salt Lake City, UT, May 4, 1998

Hajjem, C., Harnad, S. and Gingras, Y. (2005) Ten-Year Cross-Disciplinary Comparison of the Growth of Open Access and How It Increases Research Citation Impact IEEE Data Engineering Bulletin 28(4) pp. 39-47. The study analyzed 1,307,038 articles published across 12 years (1992-2003) in 10 disciplines (Biology, Psychology, Sociology, Health, Political Science, Economics, Education, Law, Business, Management). Comparing OA and NOA articles in the same journal/year, OA articles have consistently more citations (25%-250% varying with discipline and year)

Kurtz, M. J. , Eichhorn, G. , Accomazzi, A. , Grant, C. S. , Demleitner, M. , Murray, S. S. (2004) kurtz/IPM-abstract.html The Effect of Use and Access on Citations Information Processing and Management 41 (6): 1395-1402

Lawrence, S, (2001) Online or Invisible? Nature 411 (2001) (6837): 521. Landmark paper: First demonstration of the Open Access citation advantage for self-archived papers.

MacCallum CJ & Parthasarathy H (2006) Open access increases citation rate. PLoS Biol 4(5): e176. Editorial about the Eysenbach study

Moed, H. F. (2005a) Citation Analysis in Research Evaluation. NY Springer.

Moed, H. F. (2005b) Statistical Relationships Between Downloads and Citations at the Level of Individual Documents Within a Single Journal Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 56(10): 1088-1097.

Shadbolt, N., Brody, T., Carr, L. and Harnad, S. (2006) The Open Research Web: A Preview of the Optimal and the Inevitable In Jacobs, N., (Ed. Open Access: Key Strategic, Technical and Economic Aspects, chapter 21. Chandos

Francisco M. Couto, Catia Pesquita, Tiago Grego, and Paulo Veríssimo (2009). "Handling self-citations using Google Scholar". Cybermetrics 13 (1). http://www.cindoc.csic.es/cybermetrics/articles/v13i1p2.html.