Data publications correlate with citation impact

Abstract

Neuroscience and molecular biology have been generating large atasets over the past years that are reshaping how research is being conducted.In their wake, open data sharing has been singled out as a major challenge for the future of research. We conducted a comparative study of citations of data publications in both fields, showing that the average publication tagged with a data-related term by the NCBI MeSH(MedicalSubjectHeadings) curators achieves a significantly larger citation impact than the average in either field. We introduce a new metric, the data article citation index(DAC-index), to identify the most prolific authors among those data-related publications.The study is fully reproducible from an executable Rmd(RMarkdown)script to gether with all the citation datasets. We hope these results can encourage authors to more openly publish their data.