Citation Impact of Open Access IFLA Annual Conference Papers: A Methodological Approach

We used a new data gathering method to assess citation impact of IFLA conference papers. We selected 607 English open access conference papers presented at IFLA annual conference and congress during 2002-2005 and recorded number of citations to them based upon ISI, Scopus and Google Scholar databases. Result showed that 607 IFLA conference papers tended to attract 1,157 formal citations and had a mean and median citation count of 1.91 and 1 respectively. The majority of citations to IFLA conference papers were from Google Scholar (76%) and Scopus (20%) and only 4% of citations were from articles published in highly impact journals indexed by ISI. Subject analysis of IFLA conference sessions showed that information technology; issues related to national libraries; statistics and evaluation; reference work, cataloguing, classification and indexing; school libraries; and health and biosciences libraries were among top highly cited topics during 2002-2005. An important corollary from this study is that the applied method provides new opportunity to assess citation impact of ‘conference papers’ based upon wider types of citation data which have previously been unknown for monitoring research performance of conferences.