The Catch-22: To Debate It You Have to Cite It

Michael Eisen has a post at his It Is Not Junk blog taking on a paper from James Evans that suggests that free access to literature has little effect on citations. "This paper ... has many flaws," Eisen writes, proceeding with his list of "the most egregious." For one thing, Eisen says, citation rates aren't the best measure of the value of free access -- and for another, he notes, the raw data haven't been made available for other scientists to perform their own analyses. (Maybe the authors didn't think making their data available would improve their citation rate.)