Citation differences across research funding and access modalities

Authors : Pablo Dorta-González, María Isabel Dorta-González

This research provides insight into the complex relationship between open access, funding, and citation advantage. It presents an analysis of research articles and their citations in the Scopus database across 40 subject categories.

The sample includes 12 categories from Health Sciences, 7 from Life Sciences, 10 from Physical Sciences & Engineering, and 11 from Social Sciences & Humanities. Specifically, the analysis focuses on articles published in 2016 and the citations they received from 2016 to 2020.

Our findings show that open access articles published in hybrid journals receive considerably more citations than those published in gold open access journals. Articles under the hybrid gold modality are cited on average twice as much as those in the gold modality, regardless of funding.

Furthermore, we found that funded articles generally obtain 50 % more citations than unfunded ones within the same publication modality. Open access repositories significantly increase citations, particularly for articles without funding. Thus, articles in open access repositories receive 50 % more citations than paywalled ones.

URL : Citation differences across research funding and access modalities

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1016/j.acalib.2023.102734

Egocentric cocitation networks and scientific papers destinies

Authors : Béatrice Milard, Yoann Pitarch

To what extent is the destiny of a scientific paper shaped by the cocitation network in which it is involved? What are the social contexts that can explain these structuring? Using bibliometric data, interviews with researchers, and social network analysis, this article proposes a typology based on egocentric cocitation networks that displays a quadruple structuring (before and after publication): polarization, clusterization, atomization, and attrition.

It shows that the academic capital of the authors and the intellectual resources of their research are key factors of these destinies, as are the social relations between the authors concerned.

The circumstances of the publishing are also correlated with the structuring of the egocentric cocitation networks, showing how socially embedded they are. Finally, the article discusses the contribution of these original networks to the analyze of scientific production and its dynamics.

URL : Egocentric cocitation networks and scientific papers destinies

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.24732

A quantitative and qualitative open citation analysis of retracted articles in the humanities

Authors : Ivan Heibi, Silvio Peroni

In this article, we show and discuss the results of a quantitative and qualitative analysis of open citations to retracted publications in the humanities domain. Our study was conducted by selecting retracted papers in the humanities domain and marking their main characteristics (e.g., retraction reason).

Then, we gathered the citing entities and annotated their basic metadata (e.g., title, venue, etc.) and the characteristics of their in-text citations (e.g., intent, sentiment, etc.). Using these data, we performed a quantitative and qualitative study of retractions in the humanities, presenting descriptive statistics and a topic modeling analysis of the citing entities’ abstracts and the in-text citation contexts.

As part of our main findings, we noticed that there was no drop in the overall number of citations after the year of retraction, with few entities which have either mentioned the retraction or expressed a negative sentiment toward the cited publication.

In addition, on several occasions, we noticed a higher concern/awareness when it was about citing a retracted publication, by the citing entities belonging to the health sciences domain, if compared to the humanities and the social science domains. Philosophy, arts, and history are the humanities areas that showed the higher concerns toward the retraction.

URL : A quantitative and qualitative open citation analysis of retracted articles in the humanities

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1162/qss_a_00222

Gender and country biases in Wikipedia citations to scholarly publications

Authors : Xiang Zheng, Jiajing Chen, Erjia Yan, Chaoqun Ni

Ensuring Wikipedia cites scholarly publications based on quality and relevancy without biases is critical to credible and fair knowledge dissemination. We investigate gender- and country-based biases in Wikipedia citation practices using linked data from the Web of Science and a Wikipedia citation dataset.

Using coarsened exact matching, we show that publications by women are cited less by Wikipedia than expected, and publications by women are less likely to be cited than those by men. Scholarly publications by authors affiliated with non-Anglosphere countries are also disadvantaged in getting cited by Wikipedia, compared with those by authors affiliated with Anglosphere countries.

The level of gender- or country-based inequalities varies by research field, and the gender-country intersectional bias is prominent in math-intensive STEM fields. To ensure the credibility and equality of knowledge presentation, Wikipedia should consider strategies and guidelines to cite scholarly publications independent of the gender and country of authors.

URL : Gender and country biases in Wikipedia citations to scholarly publications

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.24723

Forecasting the publication and citation outcomes of COVID-19 preprints

Authors : Michael Gordon, Michael Bishop, Yiling Chen, Anna Dreber, Brandon Goldfedder, Felix Holzmeister, Magnus Johannesson, Yang Liu, Louisa Tran, Charles Twardy, Juntao Wang, Thomas Pfeiffer

Many publications on COVID-19 were released on preprint servers such as medRxiv and bioRxiv. It is unknown how reliable these preprints are, and which ones will eventually be published in scientific journals.

In this study, we use crowdsourced human forecasts to predict publication outcomes and future citation counts for a sample of 400 preprints with high Altmetric score. Most of these preprints were published within 1 year of upload on a preprint server (70%), with a considerable fraction (45%) appearing in a high-impact journal with a journal impact factor of at least 10.

On average, the preprints received 162 citations within the first year. We found that forecasters can predict if preprints will be published after 1 year and if the publishing journal has high impact. Forecasts are also informative with respect to Google Scholar citations within 1 year of upload on a preprint server.

For both types of assessment, we found statistically significant positive correlations between forecasts and observed outcomes. While the forecasts can help to provide a preliminary assessment of preprints at a faster pace than traditional peer-review, it remains to be investigated if such an assessment is suited to identify methodological problems in preprints.

URL : Forecasting the publication and citation outcomes of COVID-19 preprints

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1098/rsos.220440

Preprint citation practice in PLOS

Authors : Marc Bertin, Iana Atanassova

The role of preprints in the scientific production and their part in citations have been growing over the past 10 years. In this paper we study preprint citations in several different aspects: the progression of preprint citations over time, their relative frequencies in relation to the IMRaD structure of articles, their distributions over time, per preprint database and per PLOS journal.

We have processed the PLOS corpus that covers 7 journals and a total of about 240,000 articles up to January 2021, and produced a dataset of 8460 preprint citation contexts that cite 12 different preprint databases.

Our results show that preprint citations are found with the highest frequency in the Method section of articles, though small variations exist with respect to journals. The PLOS Computational Biology journal stands out as it contains more than three times more preprint citations than any other PLOS journal.

The relative parts of the different preprint databases are also examined. While ArXiv and bioRxiv are the most frequent citation sources, bioRxiv’s disciplinary nature can be observed as it is the source of more than 70% of preprint citations in PLOS Biology, PLOS Genetics and PLOS Pathogens.

We have also compared the lexical content of preprint citation contexts to the citation content to peer-reviewed publications. Finally, by performing a lexicometric analysis, we have shown that preprint citation contexts differ significantly from citation contexts of peer-reviewed publications.

This confirms that authors make use of different lexical content when citing preprints compared to the rest of citations.

URL : Preprint citation practice in PLOS

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-022-04388-5

The influence of funding on the Open Access citation advantage

Authors : Pablo Dorta-González, María Isabel Dorta-González

Some of the citation advantage in open access is likely due to more access allows more people to read and hence cite articles they otherwise would not. However, causation is difficult to establish and there are many possible bias. Several factors can affect the observed differences in citation rates.

Funder mandates can be one of them. Funders are likely to have OA requirement, and well-funded studies are more likely to receive more citations than poorly funded studies. In this paper this hypothesis is tested. Thus, we studied the effect of funding on the publication modality and the citations received in more than 128 thousand research articles, of which 31% were funded.

These research articles come from 40 randomly selected subject categories in the year 2016, and the citations received from the period 2016-2020 in the Scopus database. We found open articles published in hybrid journals were considerably more cited than those in open access journals.

Thus, articles under the hybrid gold modality are cite on average twice as those in the gold modality. This is the case regardless of funding, so this evidence is strong. Moreover, within the same publication modality, we found that funded articles generally obtain 50% more citations than unfunded ones.

The most cited modality is the hybrid gold and the least cited is the gold, well below even the paywalled. Furthermore, the use of open access repositories considerably increases the citations received, especially for those articles without funding. Thus, the articles in open access repositories (green) are 50% more cited than the paywalled ones.

This evidence is remarkable and does not depend on funding. Excluding the gold modality, there is a citation advantage in more than 75% of the cases and it is considerably greater among unfunded articles. This result is strong both across fields and over time

URL : https://arxiv.org/abs/2202.02082v1