Research Article (Preprint): “The Citation Advantage of Linking Publications to Research Data”

The article linked below (preprint) was recently shared on arXiv.

Title

The Citation Advantage of Linking Publications to Research Data

Authors

Giovanni Colavizza
The Alan Turing Institute
University of Amsterdam

Iain Hrynaszkiewicz
Springer Nature
Public Library of Science

Isla Staden
The Alan Turing Institute
Queen Mary University

Kirstie Whitaker
The Alan Turing Institute
University of Cambridge

Barbara McGillivray
The Alan Turing Institute
University of Cambridge

Source

via arXiv

Abstract

Efforts to make research results open and reproducible are increasingly reflected by journal policies encouraging or mandating authors to provide data availability statements. As a consequence of this, there has been a strong uptake of data availability statements in recent literature. Nevertheless, it is still unclear what proportion of these statements actually contain well-formed links to data, for example via a URL or permanent identifier, and if there is an added value in providing them.

We consider 531,889 journal articles published by PLOS and BMC which are part of the PubMed Open Access collection, categorize their data availability statements according to their content and analyze the citation advantage of different statement categories via regression.

We find that, following mandated publisher policies, data availability statements have become common by now, yet statements containing a link to a repository are still just a fraction of the total. We also find that articles with these statements, in particular, can have up to 25.36% higher citation impact on average: an encouraging result for all publishers and authors who make the effort of sharing their data. All our data and code are made available in order to reproduce and extend our results.

Direct to Full Text Article (preprint)
18 pages; PDF.

Media Coverage

UPDATED (July 11, 2019) Open Data Linked To Higher Citations For Journal Articles (via Chemistry World)

Filed under: Companies (Publishers/Vendors), Data Files, Journal Articles, Libraries, News, Open Access, PLOS, Public Libraries, Publishing, Springer Nature