investigating the citations received by journals of directory of open access journals from isi web of science’s articles

in this research, the citations received by doaj’s journals from the isi web of science’s articles in 2003 to 2008 were studied and compared. the citations received by the journals in five fields (arts & humanities, social sciences, pure sciences, technology & engineering, and health & medical sciences) as well as the difference among the citations received by doaj’s journals in the above- mentioned five fields were examined. the research method is citation analysis and the research data have been collected by means of cited reference search in the isi web of science. the english-language journals in doaj were chosen, and no sampling was used. findings showed that out of 2953 journals, 321 journals (10.87%) received citations, and the total citations received by these journals were 19050 with the mean of 6.45 per journal; the journals in pure sciences received most citations (10116 citations, equal to 53.1%), and the ones in arts & humanities received the least citations (701 citations, equal to 3.68%). on the other hand, the findings of chi-square test (χ2) indicate that there is a significant difference among the citations in the above-mentioned five fields.