PLOS ONE publication and citation data

We gathered the citation information for all PLOS ONE articles, indexed by A, from the Web of Science (WOS) Core Collection. From this data we obtained a master list of the unique digital object identifier, DOIA and the number of citations, cA, at the time of the data download (census) date (a) For the pre-print this corresponds to December 3, 2016; (b) and for the final published article this corresponds to February 25, 2019. We then used each DOIA to access the corresponding online XML version of each article at PLOS ONE by visiting the unique web address “http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=” + “DOIA”. After parsing the full-text XML (primarily the author byline data and reference list), we merged the PLOS ONE publication information and WOS citation data by matching on DOIA. #allofplos: PLOS has since made all full-text XML data freely available: https://www.plos.org/text-and-data-mining ; this option was not available at the moment of our data collection.