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Get Cited or Perish: The h-index & Researcher Incentives for Open Access

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 .

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Get Cited or Perish: The h-index & Researcher Incentives for Open Access

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  1. Get Cited or Perish: The h-index & Researcher Incentives for Open Access A. Ben Wagner, Sciences Librarian University at Buffalo

  2. 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!

  3. 2007 All scholarly articles in journals covered by SSCI 238 Cites 2007 Impact = 238 2007 cites =1.506 Factor 158 2005-06 articles The Classic Journal Impact Factor 2005-2006 Child Abuse & Neglect (journal) 158 articles

  4. 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.

  5. 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/e-resources/webofscience.html

  6. Critique of h-index • Rewards longevity, but not least-publishable-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.

  7. 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)

  8. 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

  9. Citation Indexes – Many more players - 2 • CiteSeer (primarily computer & info sci) • ScienceDirect • PsycInfo • IEEE Xplore • Spires (High Energy Physics) • IOP Journals • CrossRef

  10. 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

  11. 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.

  12. 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

  13. 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.

  14. 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

  15. 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

  16. 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/OACiteImpactBibliography.doc

  17. 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.

  18. 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.

  19. 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

  20. 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.

  21. Personal Story • Journal of Chemical Information and Modeling Article

  22. 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

  23. 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

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