Characteristics of Open Access Web Citation Network: A Multidisciplinary Study

More knowledge about Open Access (OA) scholarly publishing on the web would be helpful for citation data mining and the development of Web-based citation indexes. In the current study, five characteristics of 545 OA citing sources targeting OA research articles in four science and four social science disciplines were manually identified, including file format, hyperlinking, Internet domain, language, and publication year. About 60% of the OA citing sources targeting research papers were in PDF format, 30% were from academic domains ending in edu and ac and 70% of the citations were not hyperlinked. Moreover, 16% of the OA citing sources targeting studied papers in the eight selected disciplines were in non-English languages. Additional analyses revealed significant disciplinary differences across science and the social sciences. Overall, the OA Web citation network was dominated by PDF format files and non-hyperlinked citations. This knowledge of some characteristics shaping the OA citation network gives a better understanding about their potential uses.