Linking to Data - Effect on Citation Rates in Astronomy

TL;DR

This study investigates whether linking data to astronomical articles increases their citation rates, finding that data-linked articles tend to be cited more, which could encourage more data sharing practices.

Contribution

It provides empirical evidence that linking data to articles in astronomy correlates with higher citation rates, promoting data sharing.

Findings

Articles with data links have higher citation rates.

Data sharing encourages scientific verification and discovery.

Linking data can incentivize authors to share data.

Abstract

Is there a difference in citation rates between articles that were published with links to data and articles that were not? Besides being interesting from a purely academic point of view, this question is also highly relevant for the process of furthering science. Data sharing not only helps the process of verification of claims, but also the discovery of new findings in archival data. However, linking to data still is a far cry away from being a "practice", especially where it comes to authors providing these links during the writing and submission process. You need to have both a willingness and a publication mechanism in order to create such a practice. Showing that articles with links to data get higher citation rates might increase the willingness of scientists to take the extra steps of linking data sources to their publications. In this presentation we will show this is indeed the case: articles with links to data result in higher citation rates than articles without such links. The ADS is funded by NASA Grant NNX09AB39G.