This article statistically analyses how the citation impact of articles deposited in the Condensed Matter section of the preprint server ArXiv (hosted by Cornell University), and subsequently published in a scientific journal, compares to that of articles in the same journal that were not deposited in that archive. Its principal aim is to further illustrate and roughly estimate the effect of two factors, 'early view' and 'quality bias', upon differences in citation impact between these two sets of papers, using citation data from Thomson Scientific's Web of Science. It presents estimates for a number of journals in the field of condensed matter physics. In order to discriminate between an 'open access' effect and an early view effect, longitudinal citation data was analysed covering a time period as long as 7 years. Quality bias was measured by calculating ArXiv citation impact differentials at the level of individual authors publishing in a journal, taking into account co-authorship. The analysis provided evidence of a strong quality bias and early view effect. Correcting for these effects, there is in a sample of 6 condensed matter physics journals studied in detail, no sign of a general 'open access advantage' of papers deposited in ArXiv. The study does provide evidence that ArXiv accelerates citation, due to the fact that that ArXiv makes papers earlier available rather than that it makes papers freely available.
An analysis of 2,765 articles published in four math journals from 1997 to 2005 indicate that articles deposited in the arXiv received 35% more citations on average than non-deposited articles (an advantage of about 1.1 citations per article), and that this difference was most pronounced for highly-cited articles. Open Access, Early View, and Quality Differential were examined as three non-exclusive postulates for explaining the citation advantage. There was little support for a universal Open Access explanation, and no empirical support for Early View. There was some inferential support for a…
Van Raan et al. (2010; arXiv:1003.2113) have proposed a new indicator (MNCS) for field normalization. Since field normalization is also used in the Leiden Rankings of universities, we elaborate our critique of journal normalization in Opthof & Leydesdorff (2010; arXiv:1002.2769) in this rejoinder concerning field normalization. Fractional citation counting thoroughly solves the issue of normalization for differences in citation behavior among fields. This indicator can also be used to obtain a normalized impact factor.
With an increasing number of new scientific papers being released, it becomes harder for researchers to be aware of recent articles in their field of study. Accurately classifying papers is a first step in the direction of personalized catering and easy access to research of interest. The field of Density Functional Theory (DFT) in particular is a good example of a methodology used in very different studies, and interconnected disciplines, which has a very strong community publishing many research articles. We devise a new unsupervised method for classifying publications, based on topic modeli…
We analyze the online response to the preprint publication of a cohort of 4,606 scientific articles submitted to the preprint database arXiv.org between October 2010 and May 2011. We study three forms of responses to these preprints: downloads on the arXiv.org site, mentions on the social media site Twitter, and early citations in the scholarly record. We perform two analyses. First, we analyze the delay and time span of article downloads and Twitter mentions following submission, to understand the temporal configuration of these reactions and whether one precedes or follows the other. Second,…
We established in an earlier study that articles listed at or near the top of the daily arXiv:astro-ph mailings receive on average significantly more citations than articles further down the list. In our earlier work we were not able to decide whether this positional citation effect was due to author self-promotion of intrinsically more citable papers or whether papers are cited more often simply because they are at the top of the astro-ph listing. Using new data we can now disentangle both effects. Based on their submission times we separate articles into a self-promoted sample and a sample o…
A public preprint server such as arXiv allows authors to publish their manuscripts before submitting them to journals for peer review. It offers the chance to establish priority by making the results available upon completion. This article presents the arXiv section Quantitative Biology and investigates the advantages of preprint publications in terms of reception, which can be measured by means of citations. This paper focuses on the publication and citation delay, citation counts and the authors publishing their e-prints on arXiv. Moreover, the paper discusses the benefit for scientists as w…
We explore the degree to which papers prepublished on arXiv garner more citations, in an attempt to paint a sharper picture of fairness issues related to prepublishing. A paper's citation count is estimated using a negative-binomial generalized linear model (GLM) while observing a binary variable which indicates whether the paper has been prepublished. We control for author influence (via the authors' h-index at the time of paper writing), publication venue, and overall time that paper has been available on arXiv. Our analysis only includes papers that were eventually accepted for publication …
We continue investigation of the effect of position in announcements of newly received articles, a single day artifact, with citations received over the course of ensuing years. Earlier work [arXiv:0907.4740, arXiv:0805.0307] focused on the "visibility" effect for positions near the beginnings of announcements, and on the "self-promotion" effect associated to authors intentionally aiming for these positions, with both found correlated to a later enhanced citation rate. Here we consider a "reverse-visibility" effect for positions near the ends of announcements, and on a "procrastination" effect…
This paper quantifies to which extent preprints in arXiv accelerate scholarly communication. The following subject fields were investigated up to the year 2012: High Energy Physics (HEP), Mathematics, Astrophysics, Quantitative Biology, and Library and Information Science (LIS). Publication and citation data was downloaded from Scopus and matched with corresponding preprints in arXiv. Furthermore, the INSPIRE HEP database was used to retrieve citation data for papers related to HEP. The bibliometric analysis deals with the growth in numbers of articles published having a previous preprint in a…
This thesis investigates in the use of access log data as a source of information for identifying related scientific papers. This is done for arXiv.org, the authority for publication of e-prints in several fields of physics. Compared to citation information, access logs have the advantage of being immediately available, without manual or automatic extraction of the citation graph. Because of that, a main focus is on the question, how far user behavior can serve as a replacement for explicit meta-data, which potentially might be expensive or completely unavailable. Therefore, we compare access,…
We study the dependence of citation counts of e-prints published on the arXiv:astro-ph server on their position in the daily astro-ph listing. Using the SPIRES literature database we reconstruct the astro-ph listings from July 2002 to December 2005 and determine citation counts for e-prints from their ADS entry. We use Zipf plots to analyze the citation distributions for each astro-ph position. We find that e-prints appearing at or near the top of the astro-ph mailings receive significantly more citations than those further down the list. This difference is significant at the 7 sigma level and…
arXiv.org mediates contact with the literature for entire scholarly communities, both through provision of archival access and through daily email and web announcements of new materials, potentially many screenlengths long. We confirm and extend a surprising correlation between article position in these initial announcements, ordered by submission time, and later citation impact, due primarily to intentional "self-promotion" on the part of authors. A pure "visibility" effect was also present: the subset of articles accidentally in early positions fared measurably better in the long-term citati…
In this report we examine the change in citation behavior since the introduction of the arXiv e-print repository (Ginsparg, 2001). It has been observed that papers that initially appear as arXiv e-prints get cited more than papers that do not (Lawrence, 2001; Brody et al., 2004; Schwarz & Kennicutt, 2004; Kurtz et al., 2005a, Metcalfe, 2005). Using the citation statistics from the NASA-Smithsonian Astrophysics Data System (ADS; Kurtz et al., 1993, 2000), we confirm the findings from other studies, we examine the average citation rate to e-printed papers in the Astrophysical Journal, and we sho…
It has been shown (S. Lawrence, 2001, Nature, 411, 521) that journal articles which have been posted without charge on the internet are more heavily cited than those which have not been. Using data from the NASA Astrophysics Data System (ads.harvard.edu) and from the ArXiv e-print archive at Cornell University (arXiv.org) we examine the causes of this effect.
We demonstrate conclusively that there is no "Open Access Advantage" for papers from the Astrophysical Journal. The two to one citation advantage enjoyed by papers deposited in the arXiv e-print server is due entirely to the nature and timing of the deposited papers. This may have implications for other disciplines.
This paper is a reply to the article "Scopus's Source Normalized Impact per Paper (SNIP) versus a Journal Impact Factor based on Fractional Counting of Citations", published by Loet Leydesdorff and Tobias Opthof (arXiv:1004.3580v2 [cs.DL]). It clarifies the relationship between SNIP and Elsevier's Scopus. Since Leydesdorff and Opthof's description of SNIP is not complete, it indicates four key differences between SNIP and the indicator proposed by the two authors, and argues why the former is more valid than the latter. Nevertheless, the idea of fractional citation counting deserves further ex…
The article "Caveats for the journal and field normalizations in the CWTS (`Leiden') evaluations of research performance", published by Tobias Opthof and Loet Leydesdorff (arXiv:1002.2769) deals with a subject as important as the application of so called field normalized indicators of citation impact in the assessment of research performance of individual researchers and research groups. Field normalization aims to account for differences in citation practices across scientific-scholarly subject fields. As the primary author of the papers presenting the "Leiden" indicators and of many reports …
The characteristics of the $h$-index in the field of condensed matter physics are studied using high-quality data from ResearcherID. The results are examined in terms of theoretical descriptions of the $h$-index' overall dependence on a researcher's total number of published papers, and total number of citations. In particular, the models by Hirsch, Egghe and Rousseau, as well as by Glänzel and Schubert are examined. Special emphasis is placed on the deviations from such statistical descriptions, and it is argued that the deviation of a particular researcher's $h$ value from the Egghe-Rouseau …
The paper is dedicated to 25th anniversary of Condensed Matter Physics journal (CMP). It contains the results of comprehensive analysis of different journal-related data. CMP co-authorship relationships are studied analysing the collaboration network. Its cumulative statical and dynamical properties as well as the structure are discussed. The international contribution to the journal is assessed using the authors' affiliation data. The network of the countries collaborating within CMP is considered. Another kind of network is used to investigate the topical spectrum: two PACS indices assigned …
In this study we analyse the key driving factors of preprints in enhancing scholarly communication. To this end we use four groups of metrics, one referring to scholarly communication and based on bibliometric indicators (Web of Science and Scopus citations), while the others reflect usage (usage counts in Web of Science), capture (Mendeley readers) and social media attention (Tweets). Hereby we measure two effects associated with preprint publishing: publication delay and impact. We define and use several indicators to assess the impact of journal articles with previous preprint versions in a…
Many journals post accepted articles online before they are formally published in an issue. Early citation impact evidence for these articles could be helpful for timely research evaluation and to identify potentially important articles that quickly attract many citations. This article investigates whether Microsoft Academic can help with this task. For over 65,000 Scopus in-press articles from 2016 and 2017 across 26 fields, Microsoft Academic found 2-5 times as many citations as Scopus, depending on year and field. From manual checks of 1,122 Microsoft Academic citations not found in Scopus,…
Many studies have now reported the positive correlation between Open Access (OA) self-archiving and citation counts ("OA Advantage," OAA). But does this OAA occur because (QB) authors are more likely to self-selectively self-archive articles that are more likely to be cited (self-selection "Quality Bias": QB)? or because (QA) articles that are self-archived are more likely to be cited ("Quality Advantage": QA)? The probable answer is both. Three studies [by (i) Kurtz and co-workers in astrophysics, (ii) Moed in condensed matter physics, and (iii) Davis & Fromerth in mathematics] had reported t…
Since its creation in 1991, arXiv has become central to the diffusion of research in a number of fields. Combining data from the entirety of arXiv and the Web of Science (WoS), this paper investigates (a) the proportion of papers across all disciplines that are on arXiv and the proportion of arXiv papers that are in the WoS, (b) elapsed time between arXiv submission and journal publication, and (c) the aging characteristics and scientific impact of arXiv e-prints and their published version. It shows that the proportion of WoS papers found on arXiv varies across the specialties of physics and …
The number of citations received by authors in scientific journals has become a major parameter to assess individual researchers and the journals themselves through the impact factor. A fair assessment therefore requires that the criteria for selecting references in a given manuscript should be unbiased with respect to the authors or the journals cited. In this paper, we advocate that authors should follow two mandatory principles to select papers (later reflected in the list of references) while studying the literature for a given research: i) consider similarity of content with the topics in…
