The relationship between usage and citations in an open access mega-journal

Barbara McGillivray () and Mathias Astell
Additional contact information
Barbara McGillivray: The Alan Turing Institute
Mathias Astell: Hindawi Limited

Scientometrics, 2019, vol. 121, issue 2, No 10, 817-838

Abstract: Abstract How do the level of usage of an article, the timeframe of its usage and its subject area relate to the number of citations it accrues? This paper aims to answer this question through an observational study of usage and citation data collected about the multidisciplinary, open access mega-journal Scientific Reports. This observational study answers these questions using the following methods: an overlap analysis of most read and top-cited articles; Spearman correlation tests between total citation counts over two years and usage over various timeframes; a comparison of first months of citation for most read and all articles; a Wilcoxon test on the distribution of total citations of early cited articles and the distribution of total citations of all other articles. All analyses were performed in using the programming language R. As Scientific Reports is a multidisciplinary journal covering all natural and clinical sciences, we also looked at the differences across subjects. We found a moderate correlation between usage in the first year and citations in the first two years since publication (Spearman correlation coefficient of 0.49, α = 0.05), and that articles with high usage in the first six months are more likely to have their first citation earlier (Wilcoxon = 1,811,500, p

Keywords: Article metrics; Citation metrics; Usage metrics; Citations; Usage; Downloads; HTML views; Correlation; Interdisciplinary; Mega-journal; Scientific Reports; Bibliometrics; Scientometrics; Open access; Scholarly articles (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (8)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s11192-019-03228-3 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:scient:v:121:y:2019:i:2:d:10.1007_s11192-019-03228-3

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/economics/journal/11192

DOI: 10.1007/s11192-019-03228-3

Access Statistics for this article

Scientometrics is currently edited by Wolfgang Glänzel

More articles in Scientometrics from Springer, Akadémiai Kiadó
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().