The relationship of polarity of post-publication peer review to citation count: Evidence from Publons
ISSN: 1468-4527
Article publication date: 24 February 2020
Issue publication date: 10 June 2020
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this study is to investigate the relationship of the post-publication peer review (PPPR) polarity of a paper to that paper's citation count.
Design/methodology/approach
Papers with PPPRs from Publons.com as the experimental groups were manually matched 1:2 with the related papers without PPPR as the control group, by the same journal, the same issue (volume), the same access status (gold open access or not) and the same document type. None of the papers in the experimental group or control group received any comments or recommendations from ResearchGate, PubPeer or F1000. The polarity of the PPPRs was coded by using content analysis. A negative binomial regression analysis was conducted to examine the data by controlling the characteristics of papers.
Findings
The four experimental groups and their corresponding control groups were generated as follows: papers with neutral PPPRs, papers with both negative and positive PPPRs, papers with negative PPPRs and papers with positive PPPRs as well as four corresponding control groups (papers without PPPRs). The results are as follows: while holding the other variables (such as page count, number of authors, etc.) constant in the model, papers that received neutral PPPRs, those that received negative PPPRs and those that received both negative and positive PPPRs had no significant differences in citation count when compared to their corresponding control pairs (papers without PPPRs). Papers that received positive PPPRs had significantly greater citation count than their corresponding control pairs (papers without PPPRs) while holding the other variables (such as page count, number of authors, etc.) constant in the model.
Originality/value
Based on a broader range of PPPR sentiments, by controlling many of the confounding factors (including the characteristics of the papers and the effects of the other PPPR platforms), this study analyzed the relationship of various polarities of PPPRs to citation count.
Keywords
Acknowledgements
This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 71704057) and Guangdong Planning Office of Philosophy and Social Science of China (Grant No. GD17YTS01). We would like to thank the two anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments. We would also like to thank the Editors for their support during the review process.
Citation
Zong, Q., Fan, L., Xie, Y. and Huang, J. (2020), "The relationship of polarity of post-publication peer review to citation count: Evidence from Publons", Online Information Review, Vol. 44 No. 3, pp. 583-602. https://doi.org/10.1108/OIR-01-2019-0027
Publisher
:Emerald Publishing Limited
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