Citation Impact of Open Access IFLA Annual Conference Papers: A Methodological Approach

We used a new data gathering method to assess citation impact of IFLA conference papers. We selected 607 English open access conference papers presented at IFLA annual conference and congress during 2002-2005 and recorded number of citations to them based upon ISI, Scopus and Google Scholar databases. Result showed that 607 IFLA conference papers tended to attract 1,157 formal citations and had a mean and median citation count of 1.91 and 1 respectively. The majority of citations to IFLA conference papers were from Google Scholar (76%) and Scopus (20%) and only 4% of citations were from articles published in highly impact journals indexed by ISI. Subject analysis of IFLA conference sessions showed that information technology; issues related to national libraries; statistics and evaluation; reference work, cataloguing, classification and indexing; school libraries; and health and biosciences libraries were among top highly cited topics during 2002-2005. An important corollary from this study is that the applied method provides new opportunity to assess citation impact of ‘conference papers’ based upon wider types of citation data which have previously been unknown for monitoring research performance of conferences.

[1]  S. Lawrence.  Free online availability substantially increases a paper's impact , 2001, Nature.

[2]  Mike Thelwall,et al.  Motivations for URL citations to open access library and information science articles , 2006, Scientometrics.

[3]  Vincent Larivière,et al.  Conference proceedings as a source of scientific information: A bibliometric analysis , 2008, J. Assoc. Inf. Sci. Technol..

[4]  Stevan Harnad,et al.  Post-Gutenberg Galaxy: The Fourth Revolution in the Means of Production of Knowledge , 1991 .

[5]  Elisabeth Logan,et al.  Citation analysis using scientific publications on the Web as data source: A case study in the XML research area , 2002, Scientometrics.

[6]  Linda Butler,et al.  Extending citation analysis to non-source items , 2006, Scientometrics.

[7]  Stephen P. Harter.  The Impact of Electronic Journals on Scholarly Communication: A Citation Analysis , 1996 .

[8]  Charles Oppenheim,et al.  The citation advantage of open-access articles , 2008, J. Assoc. Inf. Sci. Technol..

[9]  Stevan Harnad,et al.  Scholarly Skywriting and the Prepublication Continuum of Scientific Inquiry , 1990 .

[10]  K. Antelman.  Do Open-Access Articles Have a Greater Research Impact? , 2004 .

[11]  C. Lee Giles,et al.  Scholarly publishing in the Internet age: a citation analysis of computer science literature , 2001, Inf. Process. Manag..

[12]  Mike Thelwall,et al.  Sources of Google Scholar citations outside the Science Citation Index: A comparison between four science disciplines , 2008, Scientometrics.

[13]  Leslie Chan,et al.  Supporting and Enhancing Scholarship in the Digital Age: The Role of Open-Access Institutional Repositories , 2004 .

[14]  Mike Thelwall,et al.  Google Scholar citations and Google Web/URL citations: A multi-discipline exploratory analysis , 2007, J. Assoc. Inf. Sci. Technol..

[15]  S. Harnad,et al.  Comparing the Impact of Open Access (OA) vs. Non-OA Articles in the Same Journals , 2004 .

[16]  Stevan Harnad,et al.  Integrating, Navigating and Analyzing Eprint Archives Through Open Citation Linking (the OpCit Project) , 2000 .