German Center for Higher Education Research and Science Studies, Berlin, Germany
ORCID: 0000-0001-5737-8483
donner@dzhw.eu
Abstract
The citations to open access preprint and working paper versions of papers that are also formally published in journals are not regularly counted in global multidisciplinary proprietary citation index databases, nor are they considered in most bibliometric studies. They are, however, integrated into paper citation counts in other citation databases. It can be argued that open access preprint citations reflect a relevant part of scientific impact of a work as proxied by citation counts, particularly in scientific disciplines that make extensive use of preprints/working papers for rapid open communication. Here we present a large-scale study of these usually uncounted open access preprint citations for the Web of Science database to provide an exploratory overview of the magnitude of this phenomenon and its distribution across disciplines. To this end, we introduce a methodology to link cited reference strings referring to preprints/working papers to their matching published journal versions. We find that at least 390,000 WoS-indexed publications have 1.1 million preprint version citations which are not included in ordinary citation counts.
Keywords
Open Access; Preprints; Citation Analysis; Working Paper; Bibliometrics
