Scientists who share data publicly receive more citations
Long-lived citation benefit, and an increase in data reuse over time is seen for gene expression studies
IMAGE: This is Fig 1 of the paper. Citation
density for papers with and without publicly available microarray data,
by year of study publication.
view more
Credit: Piwowar and Vision
A new study finds that papers with data shared in public gene
expression archives received increased numbers of citations for at least
five years. The large size of the study allowed the researchers to
exclude confounding factors that have plagued prior studies of the
effect and to spot a trend of increasing dataset reuse over time. The
findings will be important in persuading scientists that they can
benefit directly from publicly sharing their data.
The study, which adds to growing evidence for an open data citation
benefit across different scientific fields, is entitled "Data reuse and
the open citation advantage". It was conducted by Dr. Heather Piwowar of
Duke University and Dr. Todd Vision of the University of North Carolina
at Chapel Hill, and published today in PeerJ, a peer reviewed open access journal in which all articles are freely available to everyone.
The study examined citations to over ten thousand articles that
generated new gene expression data, a quarter of which had data publicly
archived in the GEO and ArrayExpress repositories. Papers with
publicly available data received about 9% more citations overall, with
the difference increasing over time. The researchers concluded that much
of this citation difference was due to actual data reuse.
"Professional advancement in science is still highly dependent on
how well your paper gets cited, even in a field like genomics where the
data underlying that paper may have far more scientific impact over the
long term." said Dr. Vision, a biologist affiliated with the National
Evolutionary Synthesis Center and the Dryad Digital Repository. "Until
the happy day when hiring and promotion committees catch up with how to
value data sharing for its own sake, it is comforting to know that
scientists can still receive credit for data sharing in a currency that
counts."
The researchers also mined the full text of articles for references
to dataset identifiers in order to study trends in data reuse directly.
They took the unusual step of discussing the obstacles they encountered
in the paper. Dr. Piwowar, at the time of the study a postdoc with the
DataONE project, said "We need more open and cohesive infrastructure to
support collecting evidence about the process and products of science.
This evidence is needed to inform important policy decisions. For
example, data archiving requirements, infrastructure, and education
should be informed by evidence about how data is and is not reused."
The mined references revealed that scientists generally stopped
publishing papers using their own datasets within two years, while other
scientists continued to reuse their data for at least six years. It
also showed that data reuse is on the rise. "Not only were the number of
reuse papers higher", says Dr. Piwowar, "but analyses from 2002 to 2004
were reusing only one or two datasets, while a quarter of the studies
by 2010 were using three or more."
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Citation to the article: Piwowar HA, Vision TJ. (2013) Data reuse and the open data citation advantage. PeerJ 1:e175 http://dx.
Other Information: The raw data behind this study are publicly available in the Dryad Digital Repository at http://doi.
Funding: This study was funded by U.S. National Science Foundation
grants to the DataONE (OCI-0830944) and Dryad (DBI-0743720) projects,
and a Discovery grant to Michael Whitlock from the Natural Sciences and
Engineering Research Council of Canada.
About PeerJ
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which offers researchers a lifetime membership, for a single low price,
giving them the ability to openly publish all future articles for free.
The launch of PeerJ occurred on February 12th, 2013. PeerJ is based in San Francisco, CA and London, UK and can be accessed at https:/
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using a Creative Commons license (CC-BY 3.0). Everything is immediately
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Media Contacts
For the Authors:
Dr Heather Piwowar
Email: hpiwowar@gmail.com
For PeerJ:
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Abstract (from the article)
Background. Attribution to the original contributor upon reuse of
published data is important both as a reward for data creators and to
document the provenance of research findings. Previous studies have
found that papers with publicly available datasets receive a higher
number of citations than similar studies without available data.
However, few previous analyses have had the statistical power to control
for the many variables known to predict citation rate, which has led to
uncertain estimates of the "citation benefit". Furthermore, little is
known about patterns in data reuse over time and across datasets.
Method and Results. Here, we look at citation rates while
controlling for many known citation predictors and investigate the
variability of data reuse. In a multivariate regression on 10,555
studies that created gene expression microarray data, we found that
studies that made data available in a public repository received 9% (95%
confidence interval: 5% to 13%) more citations than similar studies for
which the data was not made available. Date of publication, journal
impact factor, open access status, number of authors, first and last
author publication history, corresponding author country, institution
citation history, and study topic were included as covariates. The
citation benefit varied with date of dataset deposition: a citation
benefit was most clear for papers published in 2004 and 2005, at about
30%. Authors published most papers using their own datasets within two
years of their first publication on the dataset, whereas data reuse
papers published by third-party investigators continued to accumulate
for at least six years. To study patterns of data reuse directly, we
compiled 9,724 instances of third party data reuse via mention of GEO or
ArrayExpress accession numbers in the full text of papers. The level of
third-party data use was high: for 100 datasets deposited in year 0, we
estimated that 40 papers in PubMed reused a dataset by year 2, 100 by
year 4, and more than 150 data reuse papers had been published by year
5. Data reuse was distributed across a broad base of datasets: a very
conservative estimate found that 20% of the datasets deposited between
2003 and 2007 had been reused at least once by third parties.
Conclusion. After accounting for other factors affecting citation
rate, we find a robust citation benefit from open data, although a
smaller one than previously reported. We conclude there is a direct
effect of third-party data reuse that persists for years beyond the time
when researchers have published most of the papers reusing their own
data. Other factors that may also contribute to the citation benefit are
considered. We further conclude that, at least for gene expression
microarray data, a substantial fraction of archived datasets are reused,
and that the intensity of dataset reuse has been steadily increasing
since 2003.
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