Abstract:

The main purpose of this article is to reveal the effect of self-archiving on the citation impact of preprints in Information Science & Library Science (LIS). The arXiv and WoS database are used and all citations from WoS are collected to address two key questions—one is the share of papers published in the core LIS journals that also deposited in arXiv and time lags in publication process, the other is the differences in aging characteristics and citation impact of journal articles deposited in arXiv compared to those not deposited—through statistical and bibliometric analysis. The results show that the proportion of journal articles deposited in arXiv is low but there is an overall increasing trend, nearly 80% of all arXiv papers are preprints and authors are more likely to post the paper to arXiv when it is received or accepted by a journal, the preprints enjoy a boost in early citations and the citation advantage decrease with the increasing author productivity, the citations to arXiv version papers indicate an OA effect of arXiv.