Study of the Citations of ISI Web of Science's Articles to DOAJ's Journals in Health & Medical Sciences and Basic Sciences

In order to cope with the crisis of serials cost and problems associated with the shortage of budget in libraries and facilitating the access to scientific journals, the principle of Open Access to scientific publications and usually in the form of electronic journals has evolved during the last 15 years. This research aimed to clarifying the amount of citations of ISI Web of Science’s articles to DOAJ’s journals in the two fields of Health & Medical Sciences and Basic Sciences during 2003–2008 and investigating the significance of difference in the citations received by DOAJ’s journals between the above-mentioned two fields.

In this study bibliometrics method and citation analysis technique was used and 1337 English-language journals from DOAJ and without sampling were investigated. Data collected by Cited Reference Search in ISI Web of Science and analyzed by SPSS16 software.

The findings indicated that Basic Sciences, with 657 journals, received 10116 citations (62.91%). In this field Biology & Life Sciences received the most citations (6009 citations, equal to 59.4%) and Mathematics & Statistics received the least citations (91 citations, equal to 0.9%). On the other hand, Health & Medical Sciences, with 680 journals, received 5965 citations. In this field Medicine (General) received the most citations (3236 citations, equal to 54.25%) and Dentistry received the least citations (1 citation, equal to 0.01%). The findings of Chi-Square test showed no significant difference in the number of journals between the two fields of Health and Medical Sciences and Basic Sciences, but there was significant difference in the number of citations between them.

Although the number of cited journals in comparison with non-cited journals in the two fields of Health & Medical Sciences and Basic Sciences in DOAJ were relatively low, but given the increasing rate of open access journals in the database, and also considering the need to identify highly cited and valid journals in areas such as Health Sciences and Medicine and Basic Science, which is the urgent need of researchers for reliable and updated information, doing such researches has great effect in this field and will help them to access free reliable journals.