Open and overlooked: the penalties for preprint open access papers and translated journals in citation analysis Paul Donner* *donner@dzhw.eu ORCID: 0000-0001-5737-8483 Department 2 ‘Research System and Science Dynamics’, German Centre for Higher Education Research and Science Studies (DZHW), Germany The citations to open access preprint versions of papers and citations to papers in journals translated to English are not regularly counted in major proprietary citation index databases or in ordinary bibliometric research assessment even though they arguably reflect a true part of a work’s scientific impact. Here we explore the extent of these phenomena using Web of Science data. 1. Introduction Many scientific publications are published as open access preprints, often a considerable time before any eventual formal publication in a scientific journal or book. These versions may receive substantial numbers of citations which would not be counted in conventional citation analysis because the default mode is that only citations to regularly published items are counted. This could potentially disadvantage authors and institutions committed to sharing their findings early, openly, and widely. Here we investigate the size of this possible distortion which prior research shows as being far from negligibly small. Aman (2015) found that WoS-indexed references to arXiv alone, for publications from 1991- 2013, amount to 900,000 in number, more than enough to motivate an updated analysis including the wider preprint literature. Many studies have tried to identify an open access citation advantage (Langham-Putrow, Bakker, & Riegelman, 2021). Insofar as these studies have not included citations to preprint versions of both open and closed access publications, their results would be questionable. Collecting and analyzing citations to preprint versions of articles also has other applications. Traag (2021) used arXiv preprint citations to published works to formally estimate the causal effect of publication of articles in specific journals on citation impact of articles, i.e. a journal halo effect. Scopus has included preprints as listed documents on author profiles since 2021 but citations to these are not included. In 2023 Clarivate Analytics launched the Preprint Citation Index, covering documents from five platforms. This index provides citation counts tallying references from preprints to preprints and links cited references to the Web of Science Core Collection. However, citation counts to preprint and final published versions of the same item are also not unified in Web of Science. We experimentally carry out exactly this crucial additional process and analyze its consequences. A similar situation exists for articles in translated journals. A small number of journals are published in a language other than English and are translated back-to-back. Referencing authors could cite either version but the citation counts should be unified at some point for valid citation analysis. Web of Science may index either version of some of these journals so it would appear most appropriate to also link citing references to original and translated item to the indexed items to fully reflect their citation impact. Aksenteva (2015) raised awareness of this issue, noting that the indexing policy of SCI/WoS has been inconsistent. Figure 1 shows an updated version of the example case she gave. WoS identified and counted 35 of the references to the