Citations and Web Visibility on the Open Access Journals : One Correlation Analysis

There are studies on whether there may be a relationship between academic citation and web visibility. The purpose of this study was to more accurate about this relationship. Search Engine Optimization is the technique for receiving high visibility in the web environment. Academic SEO, due to the impact of open science, is extending. The uniform resource locators of the 80 open-access journals indexed on Elsevier that had two benchmarks, Cite-Score, and Impact-Factor were analyzed. For extraction of SEO-Scores of websites of these mentioned journals, used Seobility automatic analytical tool (October 2022). The data analysis tools were SPSS version 22 and Excel software. There was no significant correlation between the Google SEO ranks of websites of the open access journals and their Cite-Scores. In addition, between their Impact Factors, and SEO scores, no relationship was seen by the Spearman correlation test. Therefore, most of the citations are based on deep knowledge rather than web visibility, most probably. In other words, this current article indicates that the deep web, or what scientists do not see on the first pages of their results when they search and retrieve and cite, but on the next pages, seen and then have cited to them, is still important. This result does not contradict studies that show a correlation between citation and visibility. But, only suggests the existence of many factors in the citation of academic articles other than their open-access state, such as the deep web and citing academic celebrities.