Open Data Helps Citations

A study has shown that papers with publicly available data are more likely to be cited than papers with unavailable data.

Open-access advocates cite a variety of reasons why scientific data should be made publicly available, from ethics to furthering science. Now, researchers have uncovered another benefit of open data: according to a study published in PeerJ last week (October 1), Heather Piwowar of Duke University and Todd Vision of UNC Chapel Hill, you may be more likely to get cited.

Piwowar and Vision used a set of more than 10,000 papers that generated gene expression microarray data and determined which of them made the data publicly available. They also determined how many times the papers had been cited and the data reused. They showed that most authors reused their own data within two years of its original publication, but that data reuse by other investigators persisted for at least six years.