Citing and Reading Behaviours in High-Energy Physics. How a Community Stopped Worrying about Journals and Learned to Love Repositories

TL;DR

This study examines how High-Energy Physics researchers prefer preprint repositories over traditional journals, showing that early dissemination significantly boosts citations while journal reading is minimal.

Contribution

It provides empirical evidence that preprint repositories offer substantial citation advantages and that HEP scientists predominantly use repositories rather than journals.

Findings

Preprints significantly increase citation counts.

HEP scientists rarely read journals, favoring repositories.

Open Access journals show no clear citation advantage.

Abstract

Contemporary scholarly discourse follows many alternative routes in addition to the three-century old tradition of publication in peer-reviewed journals. The field of High- Energy Physics (HEP) has explored alternative communication strategies for decades, initially via the mass mailing of paper copies of preliminary manuscripts, then via the inception of the first online repositories and digital libraries. This field is uniquely placed to answer recurrent questions raised by the current trends in scholarly communication: is there an advantage for scientists to make their work available through repositories, often in preliminary form? Is there an advantage to publishing in Open Access journals? Do scientists still read journals or do they use digital repositories? The analysis of citation data demonstrates that free and immediate online dissemination of preprints creates an immense citation advantage in HEP, whereas publication in Open Access journals presents no discernible advantage. In addition, the analysis of clickstreams in the leading digital library of the field shows that HEP scientists seldom read journals, preferring preprints instead.