U.S. Census Bureau, Washington, DC, United States of America.
University of Oxford, Oxford, England, United Kingdom.
PLoS One. 2019 Dec 18;14(12):e0225883. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0225883. eCollection 2019.
This study estimates the effect of data sharing on the citations of academic articles, using journal policies as a natural experiment. We begin by examining 17 high-impact journals that have adopted the requirement that data from published articles be publicly posted. We match these 17 journals to 13 journals without policy changes and find that empirical articles published just before their change in editorial policy have citation rates with no statistically significant difference from those published shortly after the shift. We then ask whether this null result stems from poor compliance with data sharing policies, and use the data sharing policy changes as instrumental variables to examine more closely two leading journals in economics and political science with relatively strong enforcement of new data policies. We find that articles that make their data available receive 97 additional citations (estimate standard error of 34). We conclude that: a) authors who share data may be rewarded eventually with additional scholarly citations, and b) data-posting policies alone do not increase the impact of articles published in a journal unless those policies are enforced.
本研究使用期刊政策作为自然实验，估计了数据共享对学术文章引用的影响。我们首先考察了 17 种采用发表文章数据必须公开张贴要求的高影响力期刊。我们将这 17 种期刊与没有政策变化的 13 种期刊进行匹配，发现就在其编辑政策变更之前发表的实证文章的引用率与变更后不久发表的文章没有统计学上的显著差异。然后，我们询问这一无效结果是否源于数据共享政策执行不力，并使用数据共享政策变更作为工具变量，更仔细地考察经济学和政治学中两个具有较强新数据政策执行力度的领先期刊。我们发现，提供数据的文章获得了 97 条额外的引用（估计标准误差为 34）。我们的结论是：a）最终，分享数据的作者可能会因其学术引用而获得额外奖励，b）除非这些政策得到执行，否则仅发布数据的政策并不能增加期刊发表文章的影响力。
