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On the bibliometric nature of a foreseeable relationship: open access and education

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Abstract

The open access (OA) publication model is evolving and gaining support in the international scientific community. However, there is no evidence regarding the open access pathways being used in educational research or regarding the relationship between its subject categories and various scientometric indicators. The objective of this study was to use InCites to analyse documents published in journals from 2010 to 2016 in the SSCI categories of ‘Education and Educational Research’, ‘Education, Scientific Disciplines’ and ‘Education, Special’. The percentage of documents published in the Gold OA model increased gradually over the period studied and was higher than in the Green OA model. ‘Education, Scientific Disciplines’ was the subcategory with the highest percentage of documents published in the Gold OA. There was greater international collaboration on articles and reviews in Gold OA, especially in the pure model (publications in Gold Open Access journals), and the percentage of articles cited was higher in the Green OA and Gold OA models than in a non-OA model. There was no evidence that the Gold OA hybrid was cited more often than Green OA, and both had more impact than Gold OA pure. The Category Normalized Citation Impact values and the presence of documents in first quartile journals were higher in OA than in non-OA models. A more detailed analysis of the percentiles of the most cited publications clearly demonstrates that OA publications dominated the top percentiles of most cited articles to a greater degree than non-OA publications. The ‘Education, Special’ subcategory showed the greatest international collaboration and the highest percentage of cited documents.

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Notes

  1. OA differentiation in WoS CC is only available for publication years since 2010.

  2. The category ‘Psychology Educational’ was not considered in this analysis because it is more related to psychology and because there is a large overlap coverage with the previously selected categories.

  3. http://images.webofknowledge.com/WOKRS5272R3/help/WOS/hp_results.html.

  4. During the processing of our data, this content has been renamed in WoS to ‚Gold or Bronze’.

  5. https://doaj.org/.

  6. It should be considered that not all WoS CC document types are indexed in InCites (see Table 2).

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Acknowledgements

Remedios Aguilar-Moya and Juan-Carlos Valderrama-Zurián placement at the Bibliometrics and Publication Strategies Unit at the University of Vienna Library in April 2017 and March 2018, and February 2018, respectively. This was made possible thanks to funding received from the Erasmus + Program.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Departamento de Historia de la Ciencia y Documentación, University of Valencia, Valencia, Spain

    Juan-Carlos Valderrama-Zurián

  2. Facultad de Magisterio y Ciencias de la Educación, Universidad Católica de Valencia San Vicente Mártir, C/Sagrado Corazón 5, 46110, Godella, Spain

    Remedios Aguilar-Moya

  3. Vienna University Library, Bibliometrics and Publication Strategies, University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria

    Juan Gorraiz

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  1. Juan-Carlos Valderrama-Zurián
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Correspondence to Remedios Aguilar-Moya.

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Valderrama-Zurián, JC., Aguilar-Moya, R. & Gorraiz, J. On the bibliometric nature of a foreseeable relationship: open access and education. Scientometrics 120, 1031–1057 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-019-03175-z

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