Who gets to cite my work? Moving on from citation counting to citation diversity

This is a presentation given at the ACAT Seminar Series hosted by the Centre for Culture and Technology at Curtin University on 28 August 2025. Abstract: The number of citations that a research output receives is traditionally used as an indicator of the impact of the work. This is used extensively in university rankings, institutional reporting, academic promotions, and national research assessments. Yet, we know that citation counts only tell us very limited information about the actual impact of the work. Even with a whole suite of citation metrics (e.g., field normalised citations) developed, we are still in essence only counting the number of citations. For the last two decades, open access advocates have claimed that open access outputs receive more citations than paywalled outputs. This is met with contradictory evidence from both sides. To better understand the connections between citations and open access, we propose a new way to measure impact using citations - what we call citation diversity. Leveraging on the rapidly improving open data sources for indexing research, we analyse citation diversity for 19 million outputs and 420 million citation links globally. We demonstrate strong evidence that open access outputs receive citations from more diverse institutions, countries, subregions, regions, and fields, compared to their closed counterparts. This work also leads to new perspectives on how we can better measure or understand the impact of research beyond the traditional metrics, including asking better questions about who gets to access knowledge and participate in knowledge creation. Link to recorded presentation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1w6AxewSuUI