Effect of Peer Review on Citations in the Open Access Environment.

The article discusses and measures the effect of the peer review process on research citations and to compare the research impact of refereed and working papers. One hundred one research articles published in "Information Research: An International Electronic Journal," from the years 1998-2002 were used. The related literature on the topic of the peer review process is explored. Citation statistics are given of the research publications, of refereed papers, and of working papers. It was found that the process of peer review has a significant effect on the research impact of articles regarding the number of citations.