The influence of opening up peer review on the citations of journal articles

Jue Ni, Zhenyue Zhao, Yupo Shao, Shuo Liu, Wanlin Li, Yaoze Zhuang, Junmo Qu, Yu Cao, Nayuan Lian and Jiang Li ()
Additional contact information
Jue Ni: Nanjing University
Zhenyue Zhao: Nanjing University
Yupo Shao: Nanjing University
Shuo Liu: Nanjing University
Wanlin Li: Nanjing University
Yaoze Zhuang: Nanjing University
Junmo Qu: Yangzhou University
Yu Cao: Nanjing University
Nayuan Lian: Nanjing University
Jiang Li: Nanjing University

Scientometrics, 2021, vol. 126, issue 12, No 3, 9393-9404

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 this question, we collected the bibliographic records of 7614 papers published by Nature Communications in 2016 and 2017 from the Web of Science database and the disclosed reviewers’ comments and authors’ responses of a subset of 2293 papers. Using a linear regression model, we found no evidence of a citation advantage for the articles which disclosed their peer review documents. We concluded that opening peer review reports did not benefit papers in Nature Communications in terms of citations. We further examined whether the length of the comments and the number of rounds of the review process are associated with the papers’ citations. We found no evidence that the number of rounds is associated with the citations of the articles in Nature Communications. However, longer comments are associated with fewer citations, although the effect is weak.

Keywords: Open peer review; Review comments; Regression analysis; Citations; Rounds of review (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

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DOI: 10.1007/s11192-021-04182-9

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