Open Access and Citation Frequency: Evaluating Trends in High-Impact General Internal Medicine Journals | Journal of General Internal Medicine

"We aimed to assess whether publishing OA had an association with citation counts in high-impact general internal medicine journals....

Of the 3,672 manuscripts, AJM published 969 (26.4%), JAMA IM published 786 (21.4%), JGIM published 1,544 (42.1%), and JIM published 373 (10.2%). Overall, 397 (10.8%) manuscripts were published OA, 1,964 (53.5%) were published in 2021, and 2,027 (55.2%) were 4 or fewer pages in length. Publishing OA was associated with a greater number of citations (p < 0.001); OA articles had a median citation count of 10 (interquartile range [IQR] 4, 23), whereas SA articles had a median citation count of 3 (IQR 1, 9).

Article length was associated with citation count (p < 0.001), with shorter articles (≤ 4 pages) garnering a median of 1 citation (IQR 0, 4) and longer articles (≥ 5 pages) collecting a median of 9 citations (IQR 4, 20). After accounting for dichotomized article length, the association between publishing OA citation count remained statistically significant (p < 0.001). Shorter articles published OA earned a median of 3 citations (IQR 1, 9) while shorter articles published SA had a median of 1 citation (IQR 0, 4). Longer articles published OA had a median of 11 citations (IQR 5, 26) whereas SA longer articles garnered a median of 8 citations (IQR 3, 18) (see Table 2)....

In conclusion, we found publishing OA in general internal medicine journals was associated with a statistically significant higher citation count compared to SA [subscription access], even after accounting for the length of the article. OA articles, irrespective of length were consistently cited more than SA articles."