"Up to 90 per cent of scientific output is 'unseen' by citation indices: new paper by @osusiaprof"

Background In the past few years there has been an ongoing debate as to whether the proliferation of open access (OA) publishing would damage the peer review system and put the quality of scientific journal publishing at risk. Our aim was to inform this debate by comparing the scientific impact of OA journals with subscription journals, controlling for journal age, the country of the publisher, discipline and (for OA publishers) their business model. Methods The 2-year impact factors (the average number of citations to the articles in a journal) were used as a proxy for scientific impact. The Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) was used to identify OA journals as well as their business model. Journal age and discipline were obtained from the Ulrich's periodicals directory. Comparisons were performed on the journal level as well as on the article level where the results were weighted by the number of articles published in a journal. A total of 610 OA journals were compared with 7,609 subscription journals using Web of Science citation data while an overlapping set of 1,327 OA journals were compared with 11,124 subscription journals using Scopus data. Results Overall, average citation rates, both unweighted and weighted for the number of articles per journal, were about 30% higher for subscription journals. However, after controlling for discipline (medicine and health versus other), age of the journal (three time periods) and the location of the publisher (four largest publishing countries versus other countries) the differences largely disappeared in most subcategories except for journals that had been launched prior to 1996. OA journals that fund publishing with article processing charges (APCs) are on average cited more than other OA journals. In medicine and health, OA journals founded in the last 10 years are receiving about as many citations as subscription journals launched during the same period. Conclusions Our results indicate that OA journals indexed in Web of Science and/or Scopus are approaching the same scientific impact and quality as subscription journals, particularly in biomedicine and for journals funded by article processing charges.

In the art world, the dealer’s brand often becomes a substitute for aesthetic judgement. Mark Carrigan wonders if it the same could be said of academia; does inclusion in a prestigious journal beco…

Jobs, grants, prestige and career advancement are all partially based on an admittedly flawed concept: the journal Impact Factor. Impact factors have been becoming increasingly meaningless since 19…

Historically, papers have been physically bound to the journal in which they were published but in the electronic age papers are available individually, no longer tied to their respective...

A presentation on new bibliometric indicators such as h-index, eigenfactor, SNIP, SJR, Publish or Perish; and the use of Google Scholar and Scopus for citation…

towards a fairer culture of citation in academia

Among other excellences, a thoughtful examination of DH credit pages and how they're a departure from traditional modes of credit-granting in the humanities.

The problems facing scholarly journals extend well beyond the "publish or perish" syndrome, and grow from it, write Philip G. Altbach and Brendan Rapple.

"The results show that the opinion is slightly above the median which could be understood as “neither positive nor negative”. Surprisingly, there is a negative correlation between the number of articles published by the respondents and their opinion on the impact factor."

EZProxy etc. log-analysis tool, for gauging and reporting on e-resource usage.

Bibliometrics for books!

Good review article.

Monty Python’s rebels ponder all they must replace if they kill the Romans The researcher rebellion against the closed research-and-publishing system, tallied most explicitly in a petition boycotting publisher Elsevier, continues to expand. (The Economist covers it here, and I covered the complaints last year in a feature.) The big question, of course, is whether this noisy riot will engender something […]

Blog-borne debate about a study on the relationship between social media and scholarly communications reaches new levels of meta.

Publishers gaming impact factor by pushing authors to cite specific journals.

For many researchers, the citation is a make-or-break concept.  Most ranking algorithms use citations to determine a journal’s influence or impact.  Publication in “high impact” j…

As I mentioned in a previous post, I’ve been one of several people working on an app called total-Impact.  Total-Impact is in early alpha release: you can play around with it or check out my …