A Matter of Size? Visibility and Impact of Small Open Access Journals in Two Large Databases

Small academic publishers are commonly associated with universities, learned societies, or scientific groups with shared research agendas, differing from their larger commercial counterparts. This research explores specific bibliometric data to highlight differences and similarities of citation coverage for small journals indexed in the Web of Science (WoS) and Scopus. The paper looks at small journals in open access format in comparison to larger, non-open access journals. The goal is to problematize and assess the visibility and impact of the literature being cited in indexed and non-indexed journals and discuss the role of small open access journals as bridges for field-specific (usually non-indexed) and highly cited (mostly indexed) literature in these databases. This approach sheds light into the scholarly, publishing practices of different academic fields and disciplines.