The impact of open access citation and social media on leading top Information Science journals

This study assesses possible advantages of open access can bring to the area of Information Science, using bibliometric citation indicators and Altmetric scores to analyze sixteen hybrid scientific journals, filtered by respective Impact Factors and included in the Journal Citation Reports. Data collection was performed using Web of Science, Google Scholar, Altmetric.com and Mendeley. The verification was performed in two periods in order to examine whether open access exerted influence over time. Results indicate that open access boost the number of citations and mentions in social media for the sample of papers drawn from journals under study. Moreover, this boost is greater when authors upon publishing pay the processing charge to guarantee the immediate open access availability of the paper. In conclusion, while open access can boost the number of citations of a paper, the quality of the paper itself drives most citations.