Does open peer review improve citation count? Evidence from a propensity score matching analysis of PeerJ

Qianjin Zong (), Yafen Xie and Jiechun Liang
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Qianjin Zong: South China Normal University
Yafen Xie: Guangdong Provincial Work Injury Rehabilitation Hospital
Jiechun Liang: South China Normal University

Scientometrics, 2020, vol. 125, issue 1, No 25, 607-623

Abstract: Abstract This study aims to investigate whether open peer review can improve citation count. Articles published in PeerJ during 2013 and 2015 were chosen as the data set. Two categories of the articles were generated: articles with closed peer review history and articles with open peer review history. A propensity score matching with the radius matching method was performed using 14 confounding variables. The other five common matching methods of propensity score matching, the bias-adjusted matching estimator developed by Abadie and Imbens (Simple and bias-corrected matching estimators for average treatment effects, National Bureau of Economic Research, Cambridge, pp 1–57, 2002), and the data set excluding articles with an extremely high citation count were used to check the robustness of the results. The results of this study showed that articles with open peer review history could be expected to have significantly greater citation counts than articles with closed peer review history. Our results suggest that open peer review can improve citation count, and that the best practice for open peer review might be a compromise open peer review.

Keywords: Open peer review; Public peer review; Transparent peer review; Altmetrics; Citation count; Propensity score matching (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (10)

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DOI: 10.1007/s11192-020-03545-y

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