Data sharing by researchers is a centerpiece of Open Science principles and scientific progress. For a sample of 6019 researchers, we analyze the extent/frequency of their data sharing. Specifically, the relationship with the following four variables: how much they value data citations, the extent to which their data-sharing activities are formally recognized, their perceptions of whether sufficient credit is awarded for data sharing, and the reported extent to which data citations motivate their data sharing. In addition, we analyze the extent to which researchers have reused openly accessible data, as well as how data sharing varies by professional age-cohort, and its relationship to the value they place on data citations. Furthermore, we consider most of the explanatory variables simultaneously by estimating a multiple linear regression that predicts the extent/frequency of their data sharing. We use the dataset of the State of Open Data Survey 2019 by Springer Nature and Digital Science. Results do allow us to conclude that a desire for recognition/credit is a major incentive for data sharing. Thus, the possibility of receiving data citations is highly valued when sharing data, especially among younger 2 researchers, irrespective of the frequency with which it is practiced. Finally, the practice of data sharing was found to be more prevalent at late research career stages, despite this being when citations are less valued and have a lower motivational impact. This could be due to the fact that later-career researchers may benefit less from keeping their data private.
The journal Impact Factor (IF) is not comparable among fields of Science and Social Science because of systematic differences in publication and citation behaviour across disciplines. In this work, a decomposing of the field aggregate impact factor into five normally distributed variables is presented. Considering these factors, a Principal Component Analysis is employed to find the sources of the variance in the JCR subject categories of Science and Social Science. Although publication and citation behaviour differs largely across disciplines, principal components explain more than 78% of the total variance and the average number of references per paper is not the primary factor explaining the variance in impact factors across categories. The Categories Normalized Impact Factor (CNIF) based on the JCR subject category list is proposed and compared with the IF. This normalization is achieved by considering all the indexing categories of each journal. An empirical application, with one hundred journals in two or more subject categories of economics and business, shows that the gap between rankings is reduced around 32% in the journals analyzed. This gap is obtained as the maximum distance among the ranking percentiles from all categories where each journal is included.
Since Lawrence in 2001 proposed the open access (OA) citation advantage, the potential benefit of OA in relation to the citation impact has been discussed in depth. The methodology to test this postulate ranges from comparing the impact factors of OA journals versus traditional ones, to comparing citations of OA versus non-OA articles published in the same non-OA journals. However, conclusions are not entirely consistent among fields, and two possible explications have been suggested in those fields where a citation advantage has been observed for OA: the early view and the selection bias postulates. In this study, a longitudinal and multidisciplinary analysis of the gold OA citation advantage is developed. All research articles in all journals for all subject categories in the multidisciplinary database Web of Science are considered. A total of 1,137,634 articles -86,712 OA articles (7.6%) and 1,050,922 non-OA articles (92.4%) -published in 2009 are analysed. The citation window considered goes from 2009 to 2014, and data are aggregated for the 249 disciplines (subject categories). At journal level, we also study the evolution of journal impact factors for OA and non-OA journals in those disciplines whose OA prevalence is higher (top 36 subject categories). As the main conclusion, there is no generalizable gold OA citation advantage, neither at article nor at journal level.2
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