Citations, Open Access and University Rankings

The citation impact of research articles contributes to the assessment of the research performance of universities in some international university ranking systems either as the number of citations per paper, number of citations per faculty, total number of citations, number of highly cited papers or percentage of highly cited papers. Publishing research articles in Open Access (OA) journals has the potential for increasing the citation impact of research articles and in so doing improve an institutions position in university rankings. This chapter reviews the evidence for an increase in citations through publishing in Open Access publications.