Scientists who share data publicly receive more citations | Science Codex

"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 ..."