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closeDistinguishing Author Effects from Submission Track Effects
Posted by Phil_Davis on 07 Dec 2009 at 19:17 GMT
While the researchers control for topic, date of of publication, Open Access status, among others, they did not control for *author effects* on article citations. Since authors self-select where (and how) they submit their manuscripts, it is difficult to discern whether the effect that Rand and Pfeiffer report is the result of submission track or merely the effect of author quality.
Since Contributing authors are a different subset of the research community than Direct or Communicating authors, it is possible that the researchers are confusing author effects with submission track effects.
RE: Distinguishing Author Effects from Submission Track Effects
drand replied to Phil_Davis on 27 Nov 2013 at 11:52 GMT
In response to this comment, I contacted Patrick Gaule and asked him to reanalyze the dataset from this paper (Gaule, P., Maystre, N., Getting cited: does open access help? Research Policy 40(10), December 2011. Pages 1332-1338) which contains controls for article and author effects. He kindly did so, and replicates our results: on average, there is no significant difference between Direct and Communicated articles (p=0.735) while Contributed articles get significantly fewer citations than Direct (p=0.004). However, when analyzing the top 10% of articles in each track, both Communicated (p=.032) and Contributed (p=0.026) articles receive significantly more citations than Direct submissions. Thus our reported results are not artifacts of article or author effects.