In the Dark

I’ve long thought that The Open Journal of Astrophysics is ahead of its time, but when I checked the citation record via NASA/ADS the other day I found corroborating evidence in the form of citations from papers published in 2022! It’s very futuristic to be cited by papers that haven’t been published yet.

I’ve actually noticed this sort of thing before. Some journals announce publications and lodge metadata well in advance of the official publication date so the citations get tracked. At the Open Journal of Astrophysics we usually publish papers within a day or two of acceptance so this doesn’t really happen to papers cited from our articles.

Notice also there are citations going back to 2014. This might surprise you since our first papers were not published until 2016. The reason is that some papers were hanging around on the arXiv accumulating citations before we officially published them.a

That deals with the Ghosts of Citations Past and Citations Yet to Come so I feel I should mention the Present situation. According to ADS, as of today (22nd December 2021), papers in the Open Journal of Astrophysics have garnered 992 citations. That’s an average of just over 20 per paper. We might just get to a thousand before the end of the year. Now that would be a nice Christmas Present!

This entry was posted on December 22, 2021 at 11:56 am and is filed under Open Access with tags citations, NASA/ADS, The Open Journal of Astrophysics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.