Sharing Detailed Research Data Is Associated with Increased Citation Rate

We found that cancer clinical trials which share their microarray data were cited about 70% more frequently than clinical trials which do not. This result held even for lower-profile publications and thus is relevant to authors of all trials.

A parallel can be drawn between making study data publicly available and publishing a paper itself in an open-access journal. The association with an increased citation rate is similar. While altruism no doubt plays a part in the motivation of authors in both cases, studies have found that an additional reason authors choose to publish in open-access journals is that they believe their articles will be cited more frequently, endorsing the relevance of our result as a potential motivator.

Source: PLoS ONE

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 28th, 2007 and is filed under Access to Information, Scholarly Publishing, Search News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.