How accessibility influences citation counts: The case of citations to the full text articles available from ResearchGate

Authors

  • Mohammad Sababi School of Biology, College of Science, University of Tehran, Tehran, Iran
  • Sayed Amir Marashi Department of Biotechnology, College of Science, University of Tehran, Tehran, Iran http://orcid.org/0000-0001-9801-7449
  • Moohebat Pourmajidian Department of Biotechnology, College of Science, University of Tehran, Tehran, Iran
  • Sana S. Pourtabatabaei Department of Biotechnology, College of Science, University of Tehran, Tehran, Iran
  • Faezeh Darki School of Biology, College of Science, University of Tehran, Tehran, Iran
  • Mohammad Reza Sadrzadeh Department of Biotechnology, College of Science, University of Tehran, Tehran, Iran
  • Mohsen Dehghani Department of Biotechnology, College of Science, University of Tehran, Tehran, Iran
  • Amirali Zandieh School of Biology, College of Science, University of Tehran, Tehran, Iran
  • Mohammad Kazem Zim Department of Biotechnology, College of Science, University of Tehran, Tehran, Iran
  • Meisam Yousefi Department of Biotechnology, College of Science, University of Tehran, Tehran, Iran
  • Monireh Jamalkhah Department of Biotechnology, College of Science, University of Tehran, Tehran, Iran
  • S. Kasra Tabatabaei Department of Biotechnology, College of Science, University of Tehran, Tehran, Iran
  • Fatemeh Safaeifard Institute of Biochemistry and Biophysics, University of Tehran, Tehran, Iran
  • Andisheh Talaei Department of Biotechnology, College of Science, University of Tehran, Tehran, Iran
  • Motahareh Sobat Department of Biotechnology, College of Science, University of Tehran, Tehran, Iran
  • Faezeh Moakedi Department of Biotechnology, College of Science, University of Tehran, Tehran, Iran
  • Pouyan Nejadi School of Mathematics, Statistics and Computer Science, College of Science, University of Tehran, Tehran, Iran

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.13130/2282-5398/7997

Abstract

It is generally believed that the number of citations to an article can positively be correlated to its free online availability. In the present study, we investigated the possible impact of academic social networks on the number of citations. We chose the social web service “ResearchGate” as a case. This website acts both as a social network to connect researchers, and at the same time, as an open access repository to publish post-print version of the accepted manuscripts and final versions of open access articles. We collected the data of 1823 articles published by the authors from four different universities. By analyzing these data, we showed that although different levels of full text availability are observed for the four universities, there is always a significant positive correlation between full text availability and the citation count. Moreover, we showed that both post-print version and publisher’s version (i.e., final published version) of the archived manuscripts receive more citations than non-OA articles, and the difference in the citation counts of post-print manuscripts and publisher’s version articles is nonsignificant.

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Published

2017-08-04

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