Re: Citation analysis of author-choice OA journals

[Phil Davis <pmd8@cornell.edu>]

Stevan,

Because of the sheer number of articles published by PNAS,
tracking the performance of each article was considered too
onerous. As a result, I tracked the first and last 6-month cohort
of articles (June-Dec 2004; and June-Dec 2006). By choosing the
first and last cohort, I could estimate a temporal trend in the
data. Please remember that PNAS was only one of the 11 journals
analyzed in this study, and that Gunter Eysenbach's study (PLoS
Biology, 2006) analyzed only a 6-month cohort in one journal
(PNAS, June-Dec, 2006). Granted, a full dataset from PNAS would
have been ideal, and I encourage you to gather and share the
intervening years if you feel that the missing data points would
change significantly the results of this study. My sense is that
they won=92t, but will challenge you to prove me wrong.

--Phil Davis

Davis, P. M. (2008 in press). Author-choice open access
publishing in the biological and medical literature: a citation
analysis. Journal of the American Society for Information Science
and Technology. http://arxiv.org/abs/0808.2428


Stevan Harnad wrote:

> How does the fact that the overall sample was small and the
> PNAS sample was large justify that the entire PNAS data-set was
> not analyzed? (I don't contest that it should be analyzed (i)
> within the aggregate as well as (ii) separately, and that (iii)
> the rest should also be analyzed separately too, to avoid
> skewing, I just don't understand why the full analyses were not
> done and their results reported.)