The impact of preprints in Library and Information Science: an analysis of citations, usage and social attention indicators

The objective of this paper is to explore the impact of preprints in scholarly and broader scientific communication. In particular, the following four indicators are used to examine the 508 arXiv and 5536 non-arXiv papers in three major journals in Library and Information Science: citations from Web of Science (WoS), Scopus and Google Scholar, usage counts in WoS, Mendeley readers and Tweets. The results show that arXiv papers have significant citation advantage across WoS, Scopus and Google Scholar in each year. Google Scholar provides statistically significantly larger number of citations and more ‘early citations’ than Scopus and WoS, but does not reflect greater citation advantage for arXiv papers. The impact advantage of arXiv papers can also be observed in Mendeley readers and in Tweets, but to a much lesser extent in WoS usage counts, indicating that arXiv papers gain broader attention than non-arXiv papers not only from the users of WoS. arXiv papers have higher Altmetric coverage and shorter attention delay on social media compared with non-arXiv papers. Mendeley readership as well as the usage counts in WoS have strong correlations with WoS citations, which are much stronger than those of Tweets. We can also conclude that unlike citations, information derived from statistics on users, readers and social media needs further exploration and in the case of social media also proper context analysis.