How Does Digitization Affect Scholarship

1
How Does Digitization Affect Scholarship?

• Mark McCabe
• University of Michigan
• Roger Schonfeld
• Ithaka
• Christopher Snyder
• Dartmouth College
• May 13, 2007

2
Objectives

• What are the scholarly impacts of various
  business models for journal publishing?
• How do various business models for journal
  publishing affect the value derived by authors
  and readers?

3
Natural Experiment

• Beginning in 1995 publishers and content
  aggregators began digitizing current and archival
  content and placing it online.
• However, as late as 2005 (the endpoint of our
  analysis) backfiles for many journals remained
  offline.
• We explore the impact of online access on
  citation practices.

4
Previous Studies

• Many previous studies of this relationship find
  large effects but were flawed.
• For example, did the best journals, at least in
  some disciplines, gain an online presence
  earlier?
• This study avoids these problems Variation in
  journal quality for content published prior to
  1995 is unlikely to be related to online
  strategies adopted by publishers after 1995.

5
People, Funding, and Timeline

• Researchers
• Mark McCabe, Professor of Economics, University
  of Michigan Principal Investigator
• Chris Snyder, Professor of Economics, Dartmouth
  Co-Principal Investigator
• Roger Schonfeld, Manager of Research, Ithaka
• Funded by a grant from The Andrew W. Mellon
  Foundation
• Data collection is completed, analysis is
  underway and nearly completed, working paper
  should be available in mid 2008

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Our Data
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Our Data

• Three Disciplines
• History
• Economics and Business
• Biological and General Sciences
• Hundreds of publishers, aggregators, and archives
  provided data
• 100 journals in each discipline, comparing
  journal-year by journal-year
• 50 that were digitized early on
• 50 that were digitized only more recently or not
  at all
• Examine citations TO these journals that appeared
  in ANY journal from 1980 to 2005
• Complete citation databases obtained from ISI

8
Disciplinary Differences

• Citation activity is greatest in science, then
  economics, then history
• Citation activity is growing in all three
  disciplines (1980-1994 vs. 1995-2005)
• Authorship is most heavily concentrated in
  Anglophone countries in history (82), then
  economics (73), then science (55)
• In all three, authorship is becoming less
  concentrated in Anglophone countries (moving
  towards both Western Europe and the rest of the
  world)

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Preliminary Findings, 1956-2005
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For Economics, Online Access Boosts Citations 10
Overall
Citations relative to age 49
Online
Offline
Years since publication
Notes Results from negative binomial regression
with age dummies, digital dummy aggregated across
channels for any presence, restricted to
1956-2005 publication years
11
Online Advantage, by Discipline
12
Online Advantage, by Discipline and Geography
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Further Questions and Discussion
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Findings and Discussion I

• We find a consistent significant impact from
  digitization. At the same time, it is an order of
  magnitude less than the changes observed over
  time. Is the impact large or small and what
  implications if any are there?
• Why is the impact so much greater in Science?
  Lack of working paper culture, unlike economics?
  How to explain history?
• Preliminary evidence suggests that conditional on
  never being cited prior to 1995, online access
  increases the rate of citation to such new
  articles. How does this increase compare to the
  norm? Who is responsible?

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Findings and Discussion II

• What accounts for the greater citation impacts
  outside of the English-speaking lands?
• In Europe, relatively poor access to print
  content and scientific networks is alleviated by
  online access or
• Europeans cite differently or
• Key online channels diffused earlier and more
  widely in English-speaking countries
• We have a small number of non-English language
  titles can we measure a converse effect, i.e.
  bigger citation impacts in English-speaking
  countries?

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How Does Digitization Affect Scholarship?

• Roger C. Schonfeld
• rcs_at_ithaka.org
• (212) 500 2338
• www.ithaka.org/research/citation-analysis