COVID-19 Pandemic and Self-isolation: Impact on Bibliometrics and Use. Part II. Citation and Use

Introduction. The COVID-19 pandemic creates a unique situation for the advancement of science, scholarly communication and open access (OA). We analyzed the impact of the pandemic on citation metrics and use of scholarly resources.

Materials and methods. The study employs original keyword searches and services of WoS CC database and  InCites platform of Clarivate Analytics. It studies citation impact of publications in the datasets of WoS CC,  Clinical Medicine and COVID-publications retrieved with the keyword searches. 
We studied OA reference groups in WoS CC classification represented by two subsets of publications with the  different number of available copies: Single and Multy. 

Results and discussion. Citation Impact of COVID-publications in OA reference groups exceeds by 5–10 times  Citation Impact of publications in Clinical Medicine and WoS CC. In 2020, the percent of Single and Multy publications varies around 30 % and 70 % in different reference groups. Due to additional citations collected in  OA repositories, the Citation Impact of COVID-publications in the Multy subset is 2–7 times higher than that in the Single subset. Repository copies of Multy publications of DOAJ, Bronze, Hybrid reference groups, collect, respectively, 85 %, 56 % и 85 % of citations in Multy subset. The Multy subsets of DOAJ, Bronze, Hybrid  reference groups make, respectively, the 76 %, 91 %, 80 % input in average Citation Impact of these groups. The citation patterns of publications of the WoS CC and Clinical Medicine datasets are similar but differ from the citation pattern of COVID-publications.
Our study confirmed research hypothesis on increase in use of scholarly resources upon pandemic COVID-19 and self-isolation on the example of resources of OA repositories. The number of visits of repositories in May 2020 exceeds by 2 times the number of visits in May 2019.

Conclusion. The pandemic of novel coronavirus resulted in the 10-time increase in Citation Impact of COVID  publications as compared with Citation Impact of publications in other fields of research. Citation Impact of the OA COVID-publications in different reference groups is determined by the articles available in OA repositories and depends by their relative share. This can be a reason of different results of studies Open Access Citation Advantage.

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