Bibliometric analysis of open access research

publications

Wanyenda Chilimo

Outline

• Introduction and background

• Purpose of the study

• Review of similar studies

• Methodology

• Results and discussions

• Conclusions and recommendations

Definition of Open Access (OA)

“ A new mode of scholarly communication through

which the author(s) and right holder(s) of such

contribution grant(s) to all users a free, irrevocable,

worldwide right of access to, and a license to copy,

use, distribute, transmit, and display the work publicly

and to make and distribute derivative works, in any

digital medium for any responsible purpose, subject

to proper attribution of authorship”

Berlin Declaration of Open Access, 2003.

Introduction and back ground information

• Since the inception of the OA movement in the

1990s much has been written and studies

have been conducted on various aspects of

OA e.g.

– Viability of various OA models

– Technologies involved in making OA possible

– Management of OA repositories

Introduction and back ground information

• Perceptions of stakeholders in scholarly

publishing e.g. publishers, authors, librarians,

researchers, lawyers, funding agencies,

university administrators, national governments

etc

• OA is a widely debated issue in the scientific

community, library world, and publishing industry

and as the movement continues to evolve, there

has been a surge in publications on this

emerging phenomenon (Zao and Gang, 2007)

Purpose of the study

• Preliminary findings of a study that is being

carried out to examine research output, trends

and growth of knowledge in the field of OA

between 2003 and 2013 inclusive as indexed

and reflected in three databases

– Library and Information Science Abstracts (LISA);

– Library, Information Science & Technology

Abstracts (LISTA)

– Library and Information Science Sources (LISS).

Purpose of the study

Specifically the study sought to investigate

• Growth of OA literature from 2003 to 2013

• Journals that publish OA research

• Profiles of authors researching on OA

• The most published subject areas in OA

Significance of the study

• The study will bring awareness on the

available body of literature on OA

• Awareness of the journals where most

research in OA is produced

Review of similar studies

Bailey, 2005

– The OA Bibliography

– over 1,300 selected books, conference papers,

debates, editorials, e-prints, journal and magazine

articles, news articles, technical reports etc

published between 1999 and 2004

Zao and Gang, 2007

– A content analysis of 227 articles on OA which

appeared in peer reviewed LIS journals from 2000 to

2005

Review of similar studies – Full-length articles touching on OA publishing and self-

archiving were analysed

– Findings indicated that majority of the articles were

viewpoint articles as opposed to descriptive or empirical

studies

– Majority of the authors were LIS professionals based in the

U.S

• Collins, 2011

– Literature review of journal articles published in 2008 and

2009

– Extensive coverage of OA in 2008/2009 was due to the

economic recession of 2007 where OA was seen as a more

cost effective alternative to the crisis in scholarly

communication.

Methodology

• Bibliometric study in which LISS, LISTA and

LISA databases were used as source of data for

published research articles

• Data collection was divided into three phases. – Advanced search using “open access” as keyword and

limiting the search to subject terms, peer reviewed and

English language publications

– Advanced search using open access related keywords such

as Institutional Repository, Self archiving, etc

– Data was cleaned up, duplicates and irrelevant records

removed

– Data was analysed using Bibexcel and Excel as per

objectives

Results and Discussions

• Articles published in journals indexed in LISS

and LISTA databases and available through

EBSCOhost was 1,148.

• Articles published in journals indexed in LISA

database available through Proquest was 254.

• Total Number of articles 1,402

• Out of the 1,404 articles 1,192 were research

articles and 210 were short communication

(Table 1)

• Short communication articles were excluded

from further analysis

Publication Type

EbscoHost

ProQuest

Total

Journal Articles 957 235 1192

Editorials 35 4 39

Reports 46 - 46

News 11 - 11

Letters to the editors 2 - 2

Book reviews 2 13 15

Review of Internet sources e.g. databases, directories, web-portals 16 1 17

AO policy, Mandates and declarations 13 - 13

Interviews and discussions 3 - 3

New OA journal announcements and launching 8 - 8

Workshop and conferences notices and reports 16 - 16

Speeches 4 - 4

Other forms of communication 35 1 37

TOTAL 1,148 254 1,402

Table 1: Publication Type

Results and Discussions

• Publication growth in the first 5 years was almost 10 times

• Two initiatives considered to be drivers for the open access movement may have

contributed to rapid growth of literate in the early years

• Budapest Open Access Initiative - 2002

• Berlin Declaration of Open Access - 2003

Source of the Publications

• 1,192 retrieved journal articles were published

in 380 peer-reviewed journals

• 57 journals produced a total of 916 (77%)

Table 1

• The remaining 323 journals had 5 or less

articles each with a third of these journals

having published only 1 article on the subject

Table 2: Top Journals Source Article Count Publisher

Learned Publishing Journal 66 Ass. of Learned and professional

Society Publishers,

Serials Review

51 Elsevier

First Monday

47 University of Illinois at Chicago

Serials Librarian 44 Taylor & Francis

Information Service and Use 40 IOS Press

Serials 39 United Kingdom Serials Group.

OCLC Systems and Services 36 Emerald

Insights: the UKSG journal 27 United Kingdom Serials Group.

Journal of Academic Librarianship 26 Elsevier

Journal of Library Administration 24 Taylor & Francis

DESIDOC Journal of Library & Information

Technology

22 Ministry of Defence - India

Libre Quarterly: The Journal of European

Research Libraries

22 Association of European Research Libraries

College & Research Libraries 21 Association of college and research

Libraries

Library Philosophy & Practice 20 University of Nebraska

Online Information Review 20 Emerald

Profiles of authors researching on OA

• Most prolific authors came from institutions based in

the USA. Table 3

• This was followed by UK 3, India 3, Finland 1,

Canada 1 and Tanzania 1.

• The representation of authors from African countries

was generally low

• There was very limited collaborations in the domain

as most of the papers were single authored.

• Only 35% articles had multiple authors the rest were

single authored articles.

Table 3: Profiles of authors researching on OA AUTHOR Publications

Count

Country Affiliation

Xia, Jingfeng 17 USA Indiana University

Willinsky, John 8 USA Stanford University

Gadd, Elizabeth 8 UK Loughborough University

Hamad, Stevan 8 UK University of Southampton

Björk, Bo-Christer 7 Finland Hanken School of Economics,

Suber, Peter 7 USA Harvard University

Thatcher, Sanford G 7 USA Pennsylvania State University

Sawant, Sarika 6 India SNDT Women’s University

Bhat, Mohammad Hanief 6 India Islamia College of Science and Commerce,

Mukherjee, Bhaskar 6 India Guru Ghasidas Vishwavidyalaya University

Waltham, Mary 5 USA Mary Waltham Publishing

Dulle, F. W. 5 Tanzania Sokoine University of Agriculture

Jacsó, Peter 5 USA University of Hawaii

Nicholas, David 5 USA University of Tennessee

Pinfield, Stephen 5 UK University of Sheffield

Medeiros, Norm 5 USA Haverfold College

Morrison, Heather 5 Canada University of Ottawa

Most researched OA themes

• Subjects and subject terms were collected and

analysed

• Analysis of frequencies of occurrences of

subjects and subject terms resulted into 1,462

unique terms

• 90 subject and subject terms with the highest

frequency (word frequency >=12) are shown

in Table 5.

Subject term Count Subject term Count Subject term Count

Open access publishing 1,188 Citation analysis 38 Bibliographical citations 21

Electronic journals/periodicals 322 Archives 37 Knowledge management 20

Electronic publishing 279 Serial publications 36 Learning & scholarship 20

Publishers & publishing 209 Internet 35 Scientific literature 20

Communication in learning & scholarship 156 Computer network resources 35 Intellectual property 19

Open access 154 United States 33 Library administration 18

Institutional repositories 142 Metadata 33 Research libraries 16

Academic libraries 124 Information retrieval 32 Uniform Resource Locators 16

Research 111 Academic discourse 32 Research institutes 15

Scholarly electronic publishing 88 Websites 32 Electronic information resource searching 15

Periodicals 81 Library storage centres 31 Public access computers in libraries 15

Digital libraries 81 Libraries & publishing 29 Science 15

Libraries 69 Developing countries 29 Digital preservation 15

Universities & colleges 62 Subscriptions to serial publications 29 Online databases 15

Scholarly publishing 59 Great Britain 28 Bibliometrics 14

Information resources 57 Information technology 28 Grey literature 14

Access to information 56 Electronic books 27 Computer software 14

Electronic information resources 53

Surveys 26 Scientific community 14

Periodicals Publishing 52 Online information services 26 Communication 13

Librarians 51 Business models 26 University Presses 13

Data libraries 48 Peer review 47 ICTs 13

Information resources

Management

45 Libraries & electronic publishing 24 Internet publishing 13

Information services 43 Open Source software 24 Documentation 13

Copyright 43 Publications 24 Library materials 12

Databases 42 Scholars 23 Library users 12

Information science 41 Authors & publishers 22 Library public services 12

Scholarly publications 40 Information storage & retrieval systems 22 Medical research 12

Science publishing 39 Authors 21 Impact factor (Citation analysis) 12

Library science 39 Conferences & conventions 21 Academic dissertations 12

Table 4: Most researched OA themes

Most researched OA themes

• Impact of OA on scholarly communication and

publishing industry (4,892)

• Green OA, institutional repositories and self archiving

(531)

• Gold OA / OA journals / (468)

• Librarians / Libraries and OA (409).

• Access to information (395)

• ICTs technologies that support OA (394)

• Evaluation and quality assurance in OA scholarly

publishing (220)

• OA, intellectual property and copy right issues (62)

Conclusions and recommendations

• Growth of Literature has been significant in the

last 11 years which shows there is growing

interest in the subject

• Most research in OA is published in journals

• There is no journal specifically dedicated to

research in OA

• Single authors produced 65%

Future work

• Analysis of total publication output of prolific

authors to determine authors with strong focus

on OA

• Analysis of publication output of top journals to

determine journals with strong focus on OA

research

• Citation analysis

• Analysis of OA policies of journal that publish OA

research / How open are they?