Citations growth for journal articles that are in open digital repositories

The study, carried out as part of the BrCris, Laguna and Oasisbr projects and portal, investigated the impact of digital repositories on the average number of citations of Brazilian scientific articles. The Oasisbr portal aggregates approximately 5 million digital objects and collects metadata on 421,243 journal articles deposited in Brazilian repositories. In parallel, the OpenAlex database provided 1,901,216 records of articles exclusively linked to Brazilian institutions. The comparative analysis between articles in scientific journals and repositories (Class 1) and those only in journals (Class 2) revealed that, on average, articles deposited in repositories receive 83.10% more citations. This growth varies according to the year of publication, percentile of the journals' h-index and field of knowledge, with Social Sciences standing out (+206.02%) and a drop in fields such as Engineering and Computer Science (-8.21%). The discussion suggests that the greater visibility promoted by repositories, especially in open-sharing practices, is a determining factor in the increase in citations. Repositories facilitate the dissemination of articles on platforms such as Google Scholar, increasing the likelihood of citation, even in lower-impact journals. We conclude that repositories are strategic tools for fostering the impact and reuse of scientific knowledge.