Citation differences across research funding and access modalities

Abstract

This research provides insight into the complex relationship between open access, funding, and citation advantage. It presents an analysis of research articles and their citations in the Scopus database across 40 subject categories. The sample includes 12 categories from Health Sciences, 7 from Life Sciences, 10 from Physical Sciences & Engineering, and 11 from Social Sciences & Humanities. Specifically, the analysis focuses on articles published in 2016 and the citations they received from 2016 to 2020. Our findings show that open access articles published in hybrid journals receive considerably more citations than those published in gold open access journals. Articles under the hybrid gold modality are cited on average twice as much as those in the gold modality, regardless of funding. Furthermore, we found that funded articles generally obtain 50 % more citations than unfunded ones within the same publication modality. Open access repositories significantly increase citations, particularly for articles without funding. Thus, articles in open access repositories receive 50 % more citations than paywalled ones.