Re: Citation and Rejection Statistics for Eprints and Ejournals

From: Mark Doyle <doyle_at_aps.org> <harnad_at_COGSCI.SOTON.AC.UK>
Date: Tue, 22 Sep 1998 18:30:58 -0400

From: Mark Doyle <doyle_at_aps.org>

On Tue, 22 Sep 1998, "Greg Youngen <gyoungen_at_physics.uiuc.edu>" wrote:

> The numbers have remained pretty consistent over the time period. Of
> course the percentage of eprints will diminish in time as more and more
> articles are published citing the print literature. However, citations to
> eprints do represent a significant number of the total citations to the
> most current literature.

These are quite interesting numbers. This undercounts because some
journals will replace an author's e-print citation with the published
journal citation if this becomes known by press time. Some journals
will also just replace an e-print reference with the generic
"unpublished" (or some authors will cite it that way in the first
place).

It would also be quite interesting to see cites to all articles that
are available as e-prints, but because authors don't always update the
Journal-ref on the e-print, it may be hard to gather such numbers.
Systematic data for this probably only exists for high energy physics at
SLAC/SPIRES (and maybe also at ADS for astrophysics).

Mark Doyle
APS Research and Development
Received on Tue Aug 25 1998 - 19:17:43 BST