A study of the index time of early access articles

With the increasing popularity of early access (EA) mode, timely access to EA articles through bibliometric databases is becoming increasingly important. However, there is still a lack of extensive and in-depth research on the index time of these articles in the database. Based on the Web of Science Core Collection (WoS CC) database, the index time of 258,311 EA articles in 2018–2022 is investigated, and its influencing factors of online time, publisher, journal, WoS category, and index type are analyzed. The results show that the index time of EA articles is distributed from 1 to 14 months, and most of them is concentrated in 1 and 2 months. Publishers can be divided into five categories through cluster analysis. The nonparametric test shows that there is a small significant difference in journals, and there is no significant difference in WoS categories. The index time patterns of individual publishers or journals require targeted examination. Correlation analysis shows that online time, publisher, journal, WoS category and index type are correlated with the index time, but the correlation coefficients are all small. Publishers (journals) and databases should keep improving the quality and efficiency of indexing EA articles. Researchers and evaluators need to consider the potential impact of index time of EA articles.