On the citation advantage of Open Science practices

Making research outputs such as data, code, and preprints openly accessible carries both benefits and costs. Some researchers engage in these Open Science practices because of intrinsic motivation, while others are primarily driven by the need to comply with funder or publisher policies. An additional source of motivation for researchers to adopt these practices would be peer recognition and research impact, through citations. In this study, we investigate whether engaging in one or more Open Science practices translates into a citation advantage. We use a newly released Open Science Indicators dataset produced by PLOS and DataSeer, including all PLOS publications from 1 January 2018 to 30 September 2023 and a comparator dataset sampled from the PubMed OA collection. In total, we analyze circa 122,000 publications. We calculate publication- and author-level citation indicators and use a broad set of control variables to isolate the effect of Open Science practices on received citations. We find that posting a preprint correlates with a significant positive citation advantage for the subsequently published article of 19.6% (±.7) on average. We also find that sharing data in an online repository correlates with a smaller yet still positive citation advantage of 4.5% (±.8) on average. We do not, however, find a significant citation advantage for sharing code. Our results have limitations, including the high proportion of PLOS publications in our dataset, but they add to the evidence base available to scholarly publishers for promoting the adoption of Open Science practices.