Centre for Research on Evaluation, Science and Technology (CREST)

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Browsing Centre for Research on Evaluation, Science and Technology (CREST) by browse.metadata.advisor "Blanckenberg, Jaco"

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    An investigation of open access citation advantage through multiple measures and across subject areas for articles published from 2005 to 2014
    (Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2019-04) Basson, Isabel; Prozesky, Heidi; Mouton, Johann; Blanckenberg, Jaco; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Centre for Research on Evaluation, Science and Technology.
    ENGLISH ABSTRACT: Advocates for open access (OA) practices proclaim it to have several benefits, for researchers, for science and for society at large. One of the proposed benefits is that the increased visibility provided by gratis access to research leads to OA publications receiving more citations than those publications of which no OA versions are available. This study investigated the veracity of this claim, by determining whether OA journal articles (defined in this study as gold OA articles) experience a citation advantage when compared to non-OA journal articles. To do so, an analysis was conducted of all articles and reviews published from 2005 to 2014 and indexed in the Clarivate Analytics Web of ScienceTM (WoS). This study included a description of the presence of OA journal articles in comparison to non-OA journal articles to provide context for the citation analysis. Three different measures of citation advantage were applied, as formulated in the following research questions: 1)Do OA journal articles attain a higher mean normalised citation score (MNCS) than non-OAjournal articles? 2)Do a higher percentage of OA journal articles than non-OA journal articles receive at least onecitation within two years after publication? 3)Is there a higher percentage of OA journal articles than non-OA journal articles among themost frequently cited 1%, 5%, and 10% of articles? These questions were explored firstly for all the articles, and then for articles published in each of the years separately. Secondly, the data were disaggregated by subject area and analysed for all the articles, and then only for those published in 2014. In addition, the percentage of articles that were published in OA journals was ascertained. Whether OA journal articles experienced a citation advantage was determined through a three-fold process. Firstly, it was determined whether OA or non-OA journal articles had a higher score or percentage in terms of the measure of the citation advantage in question. Following that, the statistical significance of the difference was tested, and, lastly, the effect size was determined as an expression of the variability in the measure that access status accounts for. This study found that the percentage of articles published in OA journals had increased considerably, from 3.3% in 2005 to 13.1% in 2014. This is likely due to the launch of new OA journals, considering the retroactive assignment of the OA tag in WoS. While the vast majority of subject areas exhibited an increase in the percentage of articles published in OA journals, seven displayed a decrease. By 2014, the majority of articles, in all but three subject areas (of 274), had been published in non-OA journals. This study determined that there is no general OA or non-OA journal citation advantage, as access status accounts for little of the variability in the number of citations articles receive. This was the case for the majority of subject areas as well. OA journal articles experienced a definite citation advantage in only a few subject areas. It is therefore misleading to claim that publishing in an OA journal will necessarily lead to a citation advantage. It is likely that other factors, such as whether the journal is established and the practices of OA journals, have a stronger effect on the number of citations articles receive.