Get Cited or Perish:
The h-index & Researcher
Incentives for Open Access
A. Ben Wagner, Sciences Librarian
University at Buffalo
The OA Message to Researchers
Used to be Publish or Perish.
Now it’s increasingly Get Cited or Perish.
Open Access: more readers, more
citations, more impact
It’s your work; retain a few rights, at least
posting manuscript to repository.
Sure you publish for prestige, but you also
publish to be read!
The Classic Journal Impact Factor
2005-2006
Child Abuse &
Neglect (journal)
158 articles
238 Cites
2007
All scholarly
articles in
journals covered
by SSCI
2007 Impact = 238 2007 cites
= 1.506
Factor
158 2005-06 articles
So what?
JIF is a measure of extreme currency – 2
year window.
JIF is a GROSS average. Average article
in Nano Letters cited 10.371 times,
But the citation RANGE = 0 - 319 times
(14 articles cited zero times!).
Never ever intended to measure quality of
an individual article or author, even
Thomson Scientific says that.
A Better Citation Metric
h-Index (Hirsch Index)
An h-Index of 11 means a person (or
dept.) has 11 articles cited at least 11
times.
Easily calculated from Web of Science
http://library.buffalo.edu/libraries/eresources/webofscience.html
Critique of h-index
Rewards longevity, but not leastpublishable-unit or sheer quantity.
Recent and old work rewarded equally
Does not reward highly cited papers
Many variants (g-index, m-index, etc.
proposed to weight age, recent work, &
highly cited papers, # of coauthors)
Relatively insensitive to manipulation.
Variants of h-index
g-index = g number of papers that
received g2 citations (rewards highly cited
papers
m-index = h-index / no. of years a
researcher has published (normalizes for
longevity)
Citation Indexes – Many more players – 1
SciFinder
NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)
Google Scholar/Harzing’s POP
Amazon (Search inside this book)
Scitation/Spin Web/PROLA
Citation Bridge (US Patents)
USPTO
Optics InfoBase
Citation Indexes – Many more players - 2
CiteSeer (primarily computer & info sci)
ScienceDirect
PsycInfo
IEEE Xplore
Spires (High Energy Physics)
IOP Journals
CrossRef
My Take
For an individual or department:
h-index plus
Total cites to all published articles plus
 Citation Report graphs from appropriate the
citation databases (SCI, SSCI, AHCI,+?)
Give a pretty good take on the impact of
one’s journal articles within the limits of
available citation data.
Demonstrably superior to JIF
A Free, New Citation Tool
Harzing’s Publish or Perish
Install from:
http://www.harzing.com/pop.htm
Automatically analyzes citations from
Google Scholar for any author.
Instructive to compare Web of Science
citation report with Harzing’s report.
Warning: Dirty data, don’t take at face
value.
Harzing’s POP Statistics
 Total number of papers & citations
 Ave. number of citations per paper & per author
 Ave. number of papers per author & per year
 Hirsch's h-index and related parameters
 Egghe's g-index
 Other variations on the h-index
 Age-weighted citation rate
 Number of authors per paper
Primer on Open Access (OA)
OA simply means free-to-read.
OA is fully compatible with rigorous peer
review.
OA does not necessarily mean author-pay
(there are many models being tested).
OA journals can be low or high quality, just
like subscription journals.
Can OA have Prestige?
PLOS Biology
JIF=13.5 (7th out of 263 biochem journals)
Started in October 2003
PLOS One (in 2010 will be the largest
science journal in the world) – est. 8,000
articles
OA – a flash in the pan?
More than 4,000 fully OA, peer reviewed
journals - 2 new titles per day
1,500 OA repositories - new repository
every day.
Scientific Commons – 30 million OA items.
http://www.scientificcommons.org/
20% medical lit avail. Free within 2 years
Over 100 OA publication mandates
SO WHAT!
We publish for prestige, but we also
publish to be read & cited.
What if I point you to actual research that
shows OA articles are cited 25-250% more
than toll access (TA) articles?
http://www.buffalo.edu/~abwagner/OACiteImpactBibliogr
aphy.doc
A Couple of OA Cite Advantage Studies
(OA-CA = citations to OA vs. TA articles)
44% OA-CA in Ecology
(Norris & Rowland, 2008) The citation advantage of
open-access articles. JASIST, 59(12), 1963-1972.
OA-CA: Math (91%); Elec. Engineering
(51%); Philosophy (45%)
(Antelman 2004) Do open-access articles have a
greater research impact? College & Research
Libraries. 65(5): p. 372-382.
What you should know about OA
Know what your OA options are.
www.doaj.org
OA journal not the whole story
Most non-OA journals allow authors to
deposit their articles in an IR/DR.
See http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo/ for
publisher policies.
More on Institutional Repositories
You have rights! Retain right to mount your
hard work to an IR/DR.
Done right it will be visible to Google
Scholar, OAIster, & other OAI harvestors.
Wide variety of formats & document types
The OA Advantage
As scholar, enlarge your audience/impact.
As reader, enjoy free online access to the
literature.
As teacher, your students have free,
liability-free access (fair use, course pack).
Moving away from an unsustainable
journal publishing system.
Personal Story
Journal of Chemical Information and
Modeling Article
Check out:
 Open the channels of communication in your
field.
http://www.arl.org/sparc/bm~doc/OpenAccess.pdf
 Create Change (SPARC)
http://www.createchange.org/
Making Change Work for You
Practical steps as faculty, researcher, reviewer,
editor, society member, teacher.
 http://www.createchange.org/change/index.shtml
From Opportunity Assessment Instrument
 ACRL Scholarly Communication Toolkit:
http://www.acrl.ala.org/scholcomm/
 “10 Things You Should Know About Scholarly Communication”
http://www.acrl.org/ala/mgrps/divs/acrl/issues/scholcomm/docs/SC%
20101%2010%20Things%20You.pdf.
 “Open Access Overview” (Peter Suber):
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/overview.htm
 Open Access Scholarly Information Sourcebook: Practical Steps for
Implementing Open Access: http://www.openoasis.org/
 “Transforming Scholarly Communication and Publishing” (UB
Libraries – for faculty and students):
http://library.buffalo.edu/scholarly/index.php.
 ScholCom Staff Wiki (UB Libraries – internal):
http://libweb1.lib.buffalo.edu/aslstaff/sc/
 6 Things Researchers Need to Know about OA – P. Suber
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/newsletter/02-02-06.htm