Trends in Ecology & Evolution
What determines the citation frequency of ecological papers?
Section snippets
Citation rates and journal impact factors
The papers used in our analysis were published in 53 ecological journals with different impact factors (Box 1) and so we examined the relationship between the citation rates of individual papers and the impact factor of the journals in which they were published. The journal impact factor describes the mean citation rate of articles published in a given journal [25] and is calculated by dividing the number of citations received in the current year (e.g. 2003) for articles published in the
Citation rates and individual study characteristics
We examined the association between citation rates and two types of study characteristic: study outcome and article length. Several studies in medicine and psychology have found that the outcome of studies with respect to the hypothesis being tested influence citation rates, with either supportive or unsupportive results receiving more citations depending on the research area 14, 15, 16, 26, 30, 31. We found that the direction of study outcome with respect to the hypothesis tested might also
Citation rates and authorship characteristics
A recent survey [36] revealed that, of the authors publishing in five leading ecological journals, only 6% were females, which suggests a gender bias among senior ecologists. The range of ecological journals examined in our survey was much broader (53 versus 5) and, as a result, the proportion of articles written by females was much higher (30%). We found that gender of the first author had no effect on the citation rates of individual ecological papers (Box 3). This is in agreement with the
Conclusions
Our report is, to our knowledge, the first attempt to examine systematically the importance of various factors associated with the citation rates of ecological studies. The correlative nature of our study and the complex nature of the explanatory characteristics used make it difficult to interpret unambiguously the ultimate causes behind the observed associations. Nevertheless, the patterns that we detected suggest that factors other than the scientific utility of a study affect citation rates
Acknowledgements
We thank Erkki Haukioja, Chris Lortie and three anonymous referees for constructive comments on the earlier versions of the article, and Ellen Valle for checking the English. The study was supported financially by the Academy of Finland.
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