Are Journal Articles Accessed More Times Also Cited More?

CrossRef reports what is called resolutions every month. This document reports statistics complied monthly on the papers of each journal accessed through the digital object identifier (DOI) proxy server (http://dx.doi.org/). The Archives of Plastic Surgery (APS) also receives the report about which papers are accessed frequently through the DOI system. However, the report only includes papers that are accessed through the DOI proxy server; that is, only those papers accessed by clicking DOI addresses or by entering DOI addresses of the specific articles are included, not the papers looked up by clicking their titles on journal websites or identified through searches of databases such as PubMed, ScienceDirect, and Ovid. Therefore, the resolution report does not fully reflect how many times each paper was accessed. Rather, it indirectly demonstrates that papers are likely to have been accessed often in general when they have been accessed often by DOI search. We analyzed a total of 320 articles with assigned DOIs published in APS during a two-year period (2012–2013) to determine how frequently they were accessed through the DOI proxy server from January 2012 to March 2014. We found the following: One paper was accessed more than 199 times; four papers 100–199 times; 6 papers 50–99 times; 22 papers 30–49 times; and 106 papers 1–29 times. Thus, 139 papers were ac-cessed at least once. Of the 33 papers that were accessed 30 or more times, original articles and reconstruction were the most common article type and topic, respectively (Tables 1, 2). We also examined how many times the 139 articles accessed using DOIs at least once during the same period received citations in Science Citation Index (Expanded) (SCI[E]) papers. We found that a total of 62 articles were cited at least once—among them, one was cited more than nine times; eight were cited five to nine times; seven were cited four times; eight were cited three times; eight were cited two times; and 30 were cited once. Of these papers, the 32 papers cited at least twice were also classified by article type and topic, demonstrating that the most frequently cited article type and article topic were original article and reconstruction , respectively (Tables 1, 2). Therefore, the type and topic of the most frequently accessed and cited articles tended to be the same. We then looked for a relationship between the number of times the 139 papers accessed at least once by …