Open access citation advantage (OACA), also known as FUTON bias (for "full text on the net") is a type of bias whereby scholars tend to cite

academic journal An academic journal or scholarly journal is a periodical publication in which scholarship relating to a particular academic discipline is published. Academic journals serve as permanent and transparent forums for the presentation, scrutiny, and ...

s with

open access Open access (OA) is a set of principles and a range of practices through which research outputs are distributed online, free of access charges or other barriers. With open access strictly defined (according to the 2001 definition), or libre op ...

(OA)—that is, journals that make their full text available on the Internet without charge (not behind a

paywall A paywall is a method of restricting access to content, with a purchase or a paid subscription, especially news. Beginning in the mid-2010s, newspapers started implementing paywalls on their websites as a way to increase revenue after years of ...

)—in preference to toll-access publications. The concept was introduced, under the FUTON bias name, by UK medical researcher Reinhard Wentz in a letter to ''

The Lancet ''The Lancet'' is a weekly peer-reviewed general medical journal and one of the oldest of its kind. It is also the world's highest-impact academic journal. It was founded in England in 1823. The journal publishes original research articles ...

'' in 2002. Scholars in some fields can more easily discover and access articles whose full text is available online, which increases authors' likelihood of reading and citing these articles, an issue that was first raised and has been mainly studied in connection with

medical research Medical research (or biomedical research), also known as experimental medicine, encompasses a wide array of research, extending from " basic research" (also called ''bench science'' or ''bench research''), – involving fundamental scienti ...

. In the context of

evidence-based medicine Evidence-based medicine (EBM) is "the conscientious, explicit and judicious use of current best evidence in making decisions about the care of individual patients". The aim of EBM is to integrate the experience of the clinician, the values of t ...

, articles in expensive journals that do not provide open access may be "priced out of evidence", giving a greater weight to open access publications. Open access citation advantage may increase the

impact factor The impact factor (IF) or journal impact factor (JIF) of an academic journal is a scientometric index calculated by Clarivate that reflects the yearly mean number of citations of articles published in the last two years in a given journal, as ...

of open access journals relative to journals without open access. One study concluded that authors in medical fields "concentrate on research published in journals that are available as full text on the internet, and ignore relevant studies that are not available in full text, thus introducing an element of bias into their search result". Authors of another study conclude that "the OA advantage is a quality advantage, rather than a quality bias", that authors make a "self-selection toward using and citing the more citable articles—once OA self-archiving has made them accessible", and that open access "itself will not make an unusable (hence uncitable) paper more used and cited". A similar phenomenon, termed the "no abstract available bias" or NAA bias, is a scholar's tendency to cite journal articles that have an abstract available online more readily than articles that do not—this affects articles' citation count similarly to open access citation advantage.

See also

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