Citation and Download Analysis

Open access is a mechanism that maximizes the dissertation of scholarly literature world wide, by making them accessible without any financial or other barriers on the Internet. There is a rapid growth in self-archiving articles and publishing them in OA journals, which brings a great impact in research. This research is conducted to investigate whether there is an identifiable causal relationship between downloads and citations of the same articles in an open access repository, as well as the time-varying behaviours of downloading and subsequent citations if possible. To achieve such investigation, an automated monitoring web-based system has been developed for bringing downloading data and citation data together for analysis use. The result suggests that there is no significant pattern found in terms of all the monitored documents in the University of Tasmania open access repository, while this is not always the case if the scope is restricted to only thesis items.