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

Published version
Peer-reviewed

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Authors

McGillivray, Barbara  ORCID logo  https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3426-8200
Astell, Mathias 

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 6 months are more likely to have their first citation earlier (Wilcoxon=1811500, p < 0.0001), which is also related to higher citations in the first two years (Wilcoxon=8071200, p < 0.0001). As this final assertion is inferred based on the results of the other elements of this paper, it requires further analysis.

Description

Keywords

Article metrics, Citation metrics, Usage metrics, Citations, Usage, Downloads, HTML views, Correlation, Interdisciplinary, Mega-journal, Scientific Reports, Bibliometrics, Scientometrics, Open access, Scholarly articles

Journal Title

Scientometrics

Conference Name

Journal ISSN

0138-9130
1588-2861

Volume Title

121

Publisher

Springer Nature
Sponsorship
Alan Turing Institute (EP/N510129/1)
This work was supported by The Alan Turing Institute under the EPSRC grant EP/N510129/1.