Does Online Availability Increase Citations? Theory and Evidence from a Panel of Economics and Business Journals

Mark J. McCabe () and Christopher Snyder
Additional contact information
Mark J. McCabe: Boston University, University of Michigan, and Visiting Scholar at OFCE and SKEMA Business School

The Review of Economics and Statistics, 2015, vol. 97, issue 1, 144-165

Abstract: Does online availability boost citations? Using a panel of citations to economics and business journals, we show that the enormous effects found in previous studies were an artifact of their failure to control for article quality, disappearing once fixed effects are added as controls. The absence of aggregate effects masks heterogeneity across platforms: JSTOR has a uniquely large effect, boosting citations around 10%. We examine other sources of heterogeneity, including whether JSTOR disproportionately increases cites from developing countries or to “long-tail” articles. Our theoretical analysis informs the econometric specification and allows citation increases to be translated into welfare terms. © 2015 The President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Keywords: citations; online availability; economics journals; business journals; JSTOR; heterogeneity; welfare terms (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: A29 M00 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (43)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/REST_a_00437 (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
Working Paper: Does Online Availability Increase Citations? Theory and Evidence from a Panel of Economics and Business Journals (2015)
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:tpr:restat:v:97:y:2015:i:1:p:144-165

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://mitpressjour ... rnal/?issn=0034-6535

Access Statistics for this article

The Review of Economics and Statistics is currently edited by Pierre Azoulay, Olivier Coibion, Will Dobbie, Raymond Fisman, Benjamin R. Handel, Brian A. Jacob, Kareen Rozen, Xiaoxia Shi, Tavneet Suri and Yi Xu

More articles in The Review of Economics and Statistics from MIT Press
Bibliographic data for series maintained by The MIT Press ().