Do open access working papers attract more citations compared to printed journal articles from the same research unit?

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingArticle in proceedingsResearchpeer-review

  • Peter Ingwersen
  • Anita Elleby
This paper presents the results of an empirical case study of the characteristics of citations received by 10 open accessible non-peer reviewed working papers published by a prestigious multidisciplinary, but basically social science research institute, compared to 10 printed peer reviewed journal articles published in the same year (2004) by the same institute and predominantly by the same authors. The study analyzes the total amount of citations and citation impact observed in Web of Science (WoS) and Google Scholar (GS) received during the five-year period 2004-09 (February) by the two publication types, the citation distributions over the individual sample publications and observed years as well as over external, institutional and personal self-citations. The institute concerned is the Danish Institute for International Studies (DIIS), Copenhagen. The results demonstrate that the open access working papers publicly accessible through the DIIS e-archive became far less cited than the corresponding sample of DIIS journal articles published in printed form. However, highly cited working papers have higher impact than the average of the lower half of cited articles. Citation time series show identical distinct patterns for the articles in WoS and GS and working papers in GS, more than doubling the amount of citations received through the latter source.
Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationProceedings of the ISSI 2011 Conference : 13th International Conference of the International Society for Scientometrics & Informetrics, Durban, South Africa, 04-07 July 2011
EditorsEd Noyons, Patrick Ngulube, Jacqueline Leta
Number of pages6
Place of PublicationSouth Africa
PublisherISSI & University of Zululand
Publication date2011
Pages327-332
ISBN (Print)978-90-817527-0-1
Publication statusPublished - 2011

ID: 47035587