Citation Metrics and Open Access

Talking with Chongwon Park about a topic I often also talk about with Nathan Johnson -- citation metrics.

I used to fixate about such issues professionally, because disciplines bottle their research in commercially-licensed databases, creating firewalls that separated communication, writing, and cultural studies research. But I'll be honest, Google Scholar has made those firewalls minor obstacles.

These issues are of minor interest as I think about becoming a Full Professor, insofar as metrics matter. (My h-index is 7. My i10 index is 4.
My total number of career citations is 164, according to Google Scholar.)

My most cited article, 37 of those 164 citations, is one I wrote for the International Journal of Listening, a small, low-impact journal. But the article has a catchy title, about the ethics of listening. It's been cited in articles about listening in teaching, in nursing, in public relations, in "sexual commerce," in engineering education, in "congregational fellowship and missionality," in "folk-punk," in "computer-mediated communication. It's cited once in Finnish.

I could die a happy man having been cited this way once "Ethical listening (Beard) is a prerequisite for progressive learning, and is an essential dimension of critical race and ethnic studies, feminist research, queer studies, and research that pursues scholarship as a vehicle for social justice." I never actually said that, but someone else saw that in my work.

The broad applicability of the topic is the key to the citations, sure -- but I also wonder whether popping the manuscript on "Academia.edu" (so it's freely available outside the bottles and firewalls) has inflated the counts.

My university is asking that we add riders to all future publication contracts to make the research available in an open acess repository. I think I understand why.