Re: Open Access Citation Impact Advantage: weight of the evidence

[Heather Morrison <hgmorris@sfu.ca>]

Sandy Thatcher wrote:  I hope Heather is not seriously making the 
claim that truth is established by the greater number of articles 
that purport to prove a citation advantage.

Comment:  my framework is the evidence based librarianship 
movement, inspired by evidence based medicine. It is not just the 
number of studies that is to be taken into account, but also such 
matters as sample size and rigor of the studies. The idea is to 
base decisions and recommendations on the full weight of 
available evidence.

It is in this context that I assert that the weight of the 
evidence strongly supports an open access citation impact 
advantage.

For more information on evidence based librarianship, see this 
overview article by Jonathan D. Eldredge in the Bulletin of the 
Medical Library Association:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC35250/

Or, browse the open access peer-reviewed journal Evidence Based 
Library and Information Practice;
http://ejournals.library.ualberta.ca/index.php/EBLIP

Heather Morrison, MLIS
Doctoral Candidate, Simon Fraser University School of 
Communication
http://pages.cmns.sfu.ca/heather-morrison/
The Imaginary Journal of Poetic Economics
http://poeticeconomics.blogspot.com