Open Access increases the “Superstar effect”

New Analysis on the impact of Open Access availability on citations finds out, that Open access increases cites to the top-ranked journals but reduces cites to lower-ranked journals.

Two Economists, Mark McCabe (University of Michigan School of Information) and Christopher Snyder (Dartmouth College), have published a new study of the impact of open access on citation rates for science journal content. McCabe and Snyder found that open access increases citation rates for high-quality content, while reducing citations to lower-quality content. In their paper, “The Rich Get Richer and the Poor Get Poorer: The Effect of Open Access on Cites to Science Journals Across the Quality Spectrum,” McCabe and Snyder construct a model to explain their findings, which was based on an analysis of 100 journals in ecology, botany, and general science. The authors document what they call a “superstar effect,” in which the benefits of open access (namely, increased citations) accrue to higher quality content and journals, while lower-tier content does not receive such benefits.

Social Media references as data for RePEc rankings? Network starts Online Voting

Citation analysis in RePEc is very popular among Economists worldwide. So far it is mainly based on citations in reference lists of Journal Articles and Working Papers. But as Social Media are more and more used not only for academic networking, but also for scholarly discussions, an extended impact analysis is up for discussion.

In his latest Blog Entry RePEc member Christian Zimmermann proposes some extensions to the existing RePEc rankings, e.g. the inclusion of Wikipedia or Economics Blogs. In order to get a better understanding of the Community View, Zimmermann started an Online Voting. The results are open for everyone and show so far, that there’s a split within Economists, with one part being open for the inclusion of Social Media for citation analysis, while others are very sceptical.

This shows, that there’s definitely some change going on the scholarly publication landscape in Economics, but so far Social Media are still controversial, when it comes to quality assessment of research papers. Nevertheless there are tools like Altmetrics, who show, that impact analysis goes beyond journal impact factors. And even large research organisations like the Leibniz Association in Germany with it’s research network “Science 2.o” have started to analyse how Social Media are affecting scholarly communication.

IZA paper provides new ranking for German Economic Research Institutes

A new IZA paper by Rolf Ketzler and Klaus F Zimmermann presents a ranking for German economic research institutes (all part of the Leibniz Association) based on their publications in SSCI-Journals from 2000-2009.

In the results of the raw data, ZEW Mannheim holds the leading position with 1,511 citations, followed by DIW Berlin (1,189 citations),  ifo Munich (753 citations), IfW Kiel (593 citations), RWI Essen (382 citations) and IWH Halle (90 citations).

The authors also found an employer and publisher bias among the cites of published articles of research staff from the German research institutes: If from the Centre for European Economic Research (ZEW), articles have significantly more cites than if from the German Institute for Economic Research (DIW Berlin) or one of the others. If published in a Springer journal, the articles receive more cites than with Blackwell, and if published with Sage, the articles receive significantly less cites than with Blackwell.

Social Media are important for the impact of Academic Papers

New study finds strong correlation between the relationship between Twitter mentions and both article downloads and article citations

A new study by Xin Shuai, Alberto Pepe and Johan Bollen analyzes the online response of the scientific community to the preprint publication of scholarly articles. Based on a cohort of 4,606 scientific articles submitted to the preprint database arXiv.org between October 2010 and April 2011 they study three forms of reactions to these preprints: how they are downloaded on the arXiv.org site, how they are mentioned on the social media site Twitter, and how they are cited in the scholarly record.

They find that Twitter mentions follow rapidly after article submission and that they are correlated with later article downloads and later article citations, indicating that social media may be an important factor in determining the scientific impact of an article.

This fits very well with a study from 2011, where David McKenzie and Berk Özler analyze the Impact of Economics Blogs They found out, that “links from blogs cause a striking increase in the number of abstract views and downloads of economics papers.”

EconStor is now among the TOP20 RePEc archives

Increased visibility for German research publications in Economics

RePEc (Research Papers in Economics) is the most important database for publications in economics, currently holding more than one million bibliographic records. Many of the documents are in Open Access and therefore freely accessible on the internet. The RePEc database has a worldwide scope and offers researchers and institutions relevant functions such as citation analysis, alerting services and rankings to measure their research output and its impact. Renowned academic publishers such as Elsevier, Blackwell-Wiley and Springer also use the database as a multiplier for their journals. Moreover, RePEc is the largest scholars’ network in its field with more than 30,000 registered economic researchers.

As a national service institution for RePEc, the Open Access publication server EconStor organises the publication records for nearly one hundred German institutions and advises them and their researchers on the optimal use of RePEc. This service is free of charge and includes not only the uploads of publications but also the provision and processing of the title data such as abstracts, author keywords and classifications. Based on publication agreements with the institutions, publications are permanently archived on EconStor and made available in Open Access. Documents are searchable not only in RePEc, but also in Google and other economic portals such as EconBiz and Economists Online.

Publications from economics faculties at universities, but also from research institutes of the Leibniz Association, the Max Planck Society, the Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft, the Helmholtz Association and the German research association Verein für Socialpolitik add up to more than 32,000 titles in EconStor. Among these publications are working and discussion papers, journal articles and conference contributions. The RePEc service of EconStor was initially funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) and is now sustainably maintained by a team of ZBW experts.