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Citation is an important measure of quality, and it plays a vital role in evaluating scientific research. However, citation advantage varies from discipline to discipline, subject to subject and topic to topic. This study aims to compare the citation advantage of open access and toll access articles from four subfields of computer science.

This research studies the articles published by two prestigious publishers: Springer and Elsevier in the author-pays charges model from 2011 to 2015. For experimentation, four sub-domains of computer science are selected including (a) artificial intelligence, (b) human–computer interaction, (c) computer vision and graphics, and (d) software engineering. The open-access and toll-based citation advantage is studied and analyzed at the micro level within the computer science domain by performing independent sample t-tests.

The results of the study highlight that open access articles have a higher citation advantage as compared to toll access articles across years and sub-domains. Further, an increase in open access articles has been observed from 2011 to 2015. The findings of the study show that the citation advantage of open access articles varies among different sub-domains of a subject. The study contributed to the body of knowledge by validating the positive movement toward open access articles in the field of computer science and its sub-domains. Further, this work added the success of the author-pays charges model in terms of citation advantage to the literature of open access.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study to examine the citation advantage of the author-pays charges model at a subject level (computer science) along with four sub-domains of computer science.