Revisiting the relationship between downloads and citations: a perspective from papers with different citation patterns in the case of the Lancet

Yang Ding, Xianlei Dong, Yi Bu, Bin Zhang, Kexin Lin and Beibei Hu ()
Additional contact information
Yang Ding: Shandong Normal University
Xianlei Dong: Shandong Normal University
Yi Bu: Peking University
Bin Zhang: Nanjing University
Kexin Lin: Shandong Normal University
Beibei Hu: Shandong Normal University

Scientometrics, 2021, vol. 126, issue 9, No 13, 7609-7621

Abstract: Abstract Downloads and citations of papers are regarded as significant metrics of the academic level of researchers and the influence of journals. Besides, exploring the association between them helps grease the wheels of the academic evaluation system. In this paper, we select 7552 articles published in The Lancet from January 2007 to October 2017 as the research sample and conduct Granger causal inference to investigate the relationship and directionality between downloads and citations. Furthermore, based on the download-citation patterns of articles, this study stratifies articles to explore the directionality between the downloads and citations of articles with different patterns. The results show that 75.86% of the articles have Granger causality between download and citation counts, suggesting that there is a significant causal relationship between downloads and citations. Specifically, the proportion of articles with bilateral Granger causality between download counts and citation counts is the highest, accounting for 35.51%; the proportion of articles whose download counts affect citation counts unilaterally accounts for 14.3%; and the proportion of articles whose citation counts affect download counts unilaterally accounts for 26.05%; 24.14% of the articles have no Granger causality between downloads and citations. Further, most Lancet articles are downloaded more at the early stage after publication, while the citations mainly appear after a period of time, making the slope trend of downloads and citations inconsistent throughout the citation life cycle. Meanwhile, the Granger causal relationship between downloads and citations is related to the slope of their curves. That is, the metric with a lower slope tends to be influenced by the metric with a higher slope.

Keywords: Granger causality; VAR model; Time series; Downloads and citations (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s11192-021-04099-3 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:scient:v:126:y:2021:i:9:d:10.1007_s11192-021-04099-3

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/economics/journal/11192

DOI: 10.1007/s11192-021-04099-3

Access Statistics for this article

Scientometrics is currently edited by Wolfgang Glänzel

More articles in Scientometrics from Springer, Akadémiai Kiadó
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().