Mapping the use of open access resources by doctoral students in the USA by employing citation analysis

Published date26 September 2019
Pages112-118
DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1108/CC-05-2018-0014
Date26 September 2019
AuthorZahid Ashraf Wani,Showkat Ahmad Wani
Subject MatterLibrary & information science,Collection building & management
Mapping the use of open access resources by
doctoral students in the USA by employing
citation analysis
Zahid Ashraf Wani and Showkat Ahmad Wani
Department of Library and Information Science, University of Kashmir, Srinagar, India
Abstract
Purpose The purpose of this paper is to measure the fully open access (OA) contents cited by researchers from top three universities in the USA
(MIT, CIT and Stanford) in the eld of physics. This study aims to identify the core fully OA journals widely used by researchers in the eld of physics
and evaluate the cited fully OA resources by applying various scientometric parameters to check the credibility of these OA resources.
Design/methodology/approach The PhD theses awarded during 2014 in the eld of physics and hosted in the institutional repositories of
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), California Institute of Technology (CIT) and Stanford University, respectively, were selected and
scanned to extract references of sources cited. Later on, Google Scholar was used to identify source journals of the extracted references. On ly source
journalswere selected and analyzed; rest of other sources were ignored; accordingly, toll-access and OA journals were segregated, as such the
OA-cited journals could be identied. The scientometric performance indicators were used to check the quality of identied core fully OA journal
cited by USA researchers in the eld of physics.
Findings The results of this study show that fully OA resources are sufciently used by the researchers of top three academic institution s of the
world/USA. The study was also successful in identifying the core fully OA journals; besides it also reveals that these fully OA journ als are highly
impressive as showed by performance indicators applied. The major nding of the research includes the identication of top ten fully OA journals
along with their impact based on different scientometric parameters like number of times cited, impact factor, h-index, immediacy index, impact per
publication and Scimago Journal Rank (SJR).
Research limitations/implications Because of a limited corpus of literature scrutinized in this study, the ndings of the study may or may not
represent the global picture in the eld of physics.
Practical implications The paper conrms that fully OA resources usage trend is positively increasing day by day, and there are vast numbers of
core OA journals with high-quality impact available for use to researchers around the world. Besides, the paper also afrms the view that there
should be more publicity of fully OA literature around the globe to reap the benets of the same.
Social implications This paper will assist researchers, libraries, information centers and research and development insti tutions to take a cost-
efcient approach in using and disseminating the scholarly literature.
Originality/value This paper is one of the rst pieces of research conducted on electronic theses and dissertation (ETDs) in top three universities
of the USA, to check usage percentage and quality of fully OA journal resources cited by doctoral students in the eld of physics.
Keywords Scientometrics, Open access, IPP, Immediacy-index, Impact-factor, USA-open access
Paper type Research paper
Introduction
Every scholar requires access to latest qualitative research articles
for completing their research undertaken; however, generally,
these articles are not accessible without the subscription.
Publishers provide access to these articles by charging an
exorbitant amount of money from subscribers. We all know that
there is an economic divide between countries in general and
individuals in particular throughout the world. How can scholars
access these subscriptions-based research articles especially those
who belong to a developing country, where subscription of high
quality and costly publications is a dream. Those researchers,
who access the costly and high-quality publication, produce high-
level output and mind-blowing discoveries and inventions. The
bottleneck which widens the gap between researchers from the
developed world and underdeveloped or developing world is
unequal access to high-quality research publications. In toll-
based scholarly communication model, it has been usually seen
theprimefocusisonbetternancial returns while giving
secondary signicance to their social responsibility thereby
limiting the access. The problem of inaccessibility prevails
frequently in present times, because of the adaption of toll-access
model of scholarly communications for disseminating the
scienticndings. Open access (OA) model of scholarly
communication can provide a reliable solution to this problem.
By OAto this literature, we mean its free availability on public
internet, permitting any users to read, download, copy,
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available on
Emerald Insight at: www.emeraldinsight.com/2514-9326.htm
Collection and Curation
38/4 (2019) 112118
© Emerald Publishing Limited [ISSN 2514-9326]
[DOI 10.1108/CC-05-2018-0014]
Received 27 May 2018
Accepted 22 July 2018
112

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