In this paper, we addressed the question of whether a video abstract of an article affects its citation counts. A retrospective cohort study was conducted using the research articles published in New Journal of Physics during 2010 and 2016. Articles with video abstract (N = 315) as the experimental group, were matched 1:2, with articles without video abstract (N = 630) as the control group, by the same publishing issue, same article type. Specifically, the articles lacking video abstract that appeared immediately before and after each experimental group article were included in the control group. A negative binomial regression model was employed to analyze the data. After controlling for the characteristics of articles (including the number of authors, international co-authorship, character counts of title, character counts of text-based abstract, keyword counts, reference counts, page counts and funding), our results showed that articles with video abstract (experimental group) compared to the articles without video abstract (control group) were expected to have a rate 1.206 times greater for citation counts. This study suggests that a video abstract can potentially serve as a useful genre of a research article for receiving more citation counts.