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Purpose – Conference publications are an important aspect of research activities. There are generally both oral presentations and poster sessions at large international conferences. One can hypothesise that, for the same conferences, the papers presented in oral sessions should have a higher research impact than the papers presented in poster sessions. However, there has been no related study examining the validity of this hypothesis. In other words, the difference of research impact between papers presented orally or during poster sessions has not been discussed in literature. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to conduct a citation analysis to compare the research impact of papers presented in oral and poster sessions. Design/methodology/approach – In this paper, data from three leading conferences in the field of computer vision are examined, namely CVPR (2011 and 2012), ICCV (2011) and ECCV (2012). Several types of citation-related statistics are collected, including the number of highly cited papers (i.e. high number of citations) presented in oral and poster sessions, the total citations of both types of papers, the average citations of oral and poster papers, and the average citations of each frequently cited paper of both types. Findings – There are three main findings. First, a larger proportion of highly cited papers are from oral sessions than poster sessions. Second, the average number of citations per paper is larger for those presented in oral sessions than poster sessions. Third, the average number of citations for highly cited papers presented in oral sessions is not necessarily greater than for the ones presented in poster sessions. Originality/value – The originality of this paper is that it is the first attempt to examine the differences of citation impacts of conference papers presented in oral and poster sessions. The findings of this study will allow future bibliometrics research to further explore this related issue for longer periods and different fields.

Purpose – Informally computer scientists reported they could access free copies of research papers they needed via tools such as Google Scholar. To ascertain whether this perception came from widespread free access or from unnoticed employer-paid access, the purpose of this paper was to locate computer science papers and determine what proportion was freely available using Google Scholar. Design/methodology/approach – A sample of 1,967 conference papers and periodical papers from 2003 to 2010, indexed in the ACM Guide to Computing Literature, was searched for manually in Google Scholar, using the paper or article title and the first author's surname and supplementary searches as needed. Findings – Free full-text versions were found for 52 per cent of the conference papers and 55 per cent of the periodical papers. Documents with older publication dates were more likely to be freely accessible than newer documents, with free versions found for 71 per cent of items published in 2003 and 43 per cent of items published in 2010. Research limitations/implications – Results were limited to the retrieval of known computer science publications via Google Scholar. Future research could examine whether the decline found in this study is specific to Google Scholar or reflects a decrease in the free sharing of research by computer scientists. Originality/value – Previous research for computer science found lower levels of free access than this research determined, but the decline found in this study runs contrary to increases that have been found. This research confirms many computer science papers are available for free but also that subscription holdings are necessary for complete coverage of papers in the field.