Impact of e-print Archives: A Case Study of Physics Archives

Abstract

E-print archives (electronic preprints) have become the first choice of many researchers for current research, breaking scientific discoveries, and keeping up with colleagues (and competitors) at other institutions. The citations being received to e-prints are evidences of the above stated importance of the archives. Impact Factor and Immediacy Index devised by Thomson Scientific Inc. (formerly Institute for Scientific Information (ISI), Philadelphia) are two parameters based on citations to evaluate traditional journals. These parameters for nearly 6000 scientific journals from all over the world are published yearly as Journal Citation Reports (JCR). As a case study, the present work has made an endeavour to calculate impact factors and immediacy indices of archives uploaded in the Physics categories of arXiv.org of Cornell University, USA by treating them as individual journals. The Physics e-prints uploaded in arXiv.org are classified into twelve sub-categories: viz. AstroPhysics (astro-ph); Condensed Matter (cond-mat); General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology (gr-qc); High Energy Physics - Experiment (hep-ex); High Energy Physics - Lattice (hep-lat); High Energy Physics - Phenomenology (hep-ph); High Energy Physics - Theory (hep-th); Mathematical Physics (math-ph); Nuclear Experiment (nucl-ex); Nuclear Theory (nucl-th); General Physics (Physics); and Quantum Physics (quant-ph). Calculated impact factors and immediacy indices reveal that Nuclear Experiment has made good impact among the categories and followed by High-Energy Physics classes of arXiv.org (High Energy Physics – Theory; High Energy Physics – Lattice; High Energy Physics – Experiment; and High Energy Physics - Phenomenology). The citation trackers like Scopus and web-tools like ‘Google-Scholar’, ‘Citebase’, ‘Citeseer’ etc. will further strengthen the concluded impact of the archives.