The hyperlinking pattern of open-access journals in library and information science: A cited citing reference study

Using 17 open-access journals published without interruption between 2000 and 2004 in the field of library and information science, this study compares the pattern of cited/citing hyperlinked references of Web-based scholarly electronic articles under various citation ranges in terms of language, file format, source and top-level domain. While the patterns of cited references were manually examined by counting the live hyperlinked-cited references, the patterns of citing references were examined by using the cited by tag in Google Scholar. The analysis indicates that although language, top-level domain, and file format of citations did not differ significantly for articles under different citation ranges, sources of citation differed significantly for articles in different citation ranges. Articles with fewer citations mostly cite less-scholarly sources such as Web pages, whereas articles with a higher number of citations mostly cite scholarly sources such as journal articles, etc. The findings suggest that 8 out of 17 OA journals in LIS have significant research impact in the scholarly communication process.