The Scholarly Communication Speed of Library and Information Science Open Access Journals as Measured by First-Citation

• Main Authors: Tai-Chi Yu, Wen-Yau Cathy Lin
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: National Taiwan University 2016-06-01
• Series: Journal of Library and Information Studies
• Subjects: first-citation speed; open access journal; lis; scopus; wos
• Online Access: https://jlis.lis.ntu.edu.tw/files/journal/j42-6.pdf

Based on the time of journal article first-citation appearance, this study analyzed the citation speeds of Open Access (OA) journals within Library and Information Science (LIS) field indexed in Scopus and WoS database. Articles published between 2010 and 2014 by a total of 8 Full-OA journals and 13 Hybrid-OA journals indexed by 2010-2013 edition of JCR were collected and analyzed in June 2015. Results showed that there were 639 articles being cited in Scopus and the average first-citation speed was 1.17 year. On the other hand, there were 434 articles being cited in WoS with a slightly higher first-time citation rate of 1.37 year. Most of the articles studied were cited for the first time in the same year or the year after of its publication. There were some articles being cited even before its official publication. Within the Hybrid-OA journals, articles belong to the OA mechanism did have shorter speed citation time than non-OA ones. This study suggested that further studies could adopt the concept of Altmetrics to investigate the first-usage speeds through the formal and informal communication channels. (Article content in Chinese with English extended abstract)