A study of the impact of data sharing on article citations using journal policies as a natural experiment

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.

本研究以期刊政策作为自然实验，评估数据共享对学术论文被引量的影响。我们首先考察了17种已推行“已发表论文配套数据需公开上传”要求的高影响力期刊。将这17种期刊与13种未发生政策变更的期刊进行匹配后发现，在编辑政策调整前夕发表的实证研究论文，其被引量与政策调整后短期内发表的同类论文相比，未呈现统计学意义上的显著差异。随后本研究探究这一零结果是否源于数据共享政策落实不力，并以数据共享政策变更作为工具变量，对经济学与政治学领域内2家对新数据政策执行力度相对较强的顶尖期刊展开更细致的分析。研究发现，公开配套数据的论文可额外获得97次被引量（估计标准误为34）。本研究得出如下结论：a) 共享研究数据的作者最终或可通过更多的学术被引量获得回报；b) 若无政策执行保障，仅推行数据上传政策无法提升期刊所发表论文的学术影响力。