Do open access articles in economics have a citation advantage

Using citation data from three different databases, it is shown that articles that are freely available on the internet have indeed a significantly higher citation count.

Abstract

We investigate whether articles in economics that are freely available on the web have a citation advantage over articles with a gated access. Our sample consists of articles from 2005 from 13 economic journals (including the top five journals). In addition to standard mean comparisons we also use a negative-binomial regression model with several covariates to control for potential selection effects and quality bias. Using citation data from three different databases (Web of Science, RePEc and Google Scholar) we show that articles that are freely available on the internet have indeed a significantly higher citation count.