Self-Archiving means twice the citations

(Posted to this blog on 11/25/06)

Stevan Harnad of the Open Access Citation Index Working Group reports that self-archived astrophysics articles are cited twice as open as those not archived by their authors--jon.

>>>In astrophysics, Kurtz found that articles that were
self-archived by their authors in Arxiv were downloaded and cited
twice as much as those that were not. He traced this enhanced citation
impact to two factors: (1) Early Access (EA): The self-archived
preprint was accessible earlier than the publisher's version (which
is accessible to all research-active astrophysicists as soon as
it is published, thanks to Kurtz's ADS system). (Hajjem, however,
found that in other fields, which self-archive only published
postprints and do have accessibility/affordability problems with
the publisher's version, self-archived articles still have enhanced
citation impact.) Kurtz's second factor was: (2) Quality Bias (QB),
a selective tendency for higher quality articles to be preferentially
self-archived by their authors, as inferred from the fact that the
proportion of self-archived articles turns out to be higher among
the more highly cited articles....

Henneken, E. A., Kurtz, M. J., Eichhorn, G., Accomazzi, A., Grant,
C., Thompson, D., and Murray, S. S. (2006) Effect of E-printing
on Citation Rates in Astronomy and Physics. Journal of Electronic
Publishing, Vol. 9, No. 2
http://arxiv.org/abs/cs/0604061

Henneken, E. A., Kurtz, M. J., Warner, S., Ginsparg, P., Eichhorn, G.,
Accomazzi, A., Grant, C. S., Thompson, D., Bohlen, E. and Murray, S.
S. (2006) E-prints and Journal Articles in Astronomy: a Productive
Co-existence (submitted to Learned Publishing)
http://arxiv.org/abs/cs/0609126

Kurtz, M. J., Eichhorn, G., Accomazzi, A., Grant, C. S., Demleitner,
M., Murray, S. S. (2005) The Effect of Use and Access on Citations.
Information Processing and Management, 41 (6): 1395-1402
http://cfa-www.harvard.edu/~kurtz/kurtz-effect.pdf