Does opening up peer review benefit science in terms of citations?. Issue 1 (22nd October 2020)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Ni, Jue; Zhao, Zhenyue; Shao, Yupo; Liu, Shuo; Li, Wanlin; Li, Jiang
• Is Part Of: Proceedings of the Association for Information Science and Technology. Volume 57:Issue 1(2020)
• Page Start: n/a
• Page End: n/a
• Publication Date: 2020-10-22
• Subjects: citations -- matching -- open peer review -- review comments -- rounds of review; Information science -- Congresses; Information technology -- Congresses; Information science; Information technology; Conference papers and proceedings; 020
• DOI: 10.1002/pra2.258
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 2373-9231

Abstract

Abstract: This paper studied whether opening up review reports benefits science in terms of citations, by taking Nature Communications as an example. To address these questions, we extracted 3, 500 papers published in Nature Communications in 2016 and 4, 326 papers in 2017 and retrieved their three‐year citations since publication in the Web of Science database. By applying the Matching method, we constructed an observation group including 1, 726 open peer review (OPR) papers and a control group including 1, 726 non‐OPR counterparts. The results of the paired sample t ‐test showed no significant difference between the OPR and non‐OPR papers. We conclude that opening up peer review reports did not benefit papers in Nature Communications in terms of citations. We further examined whether the length, the rounds or the lexical diversity of the review report contributed to the paper's citations, through regression analysis. As a result, we found that longer comments, more rounds of review and the more diversified words did not contribute to the citations of the OPR papers in Nature Communications . Further research covering more OPR journals is required to justify the benefits of OPR.