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Do cover papers get better citations and usage counts? An analysis of 42 journals in cell biology

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Abstract

Research on the impact of and attention given to journal covers is a crucial research topic in academia. This study investigated whether a paper featured on the cover of a journal receives more citations and higher usage than non-cover papers. Unlike previous studies that focused on just a few prestigious journals, we analyzed the citations and usage counts of 3196 cover and 36,652 non-cover papers published in 42 cell biology journals from 2011 to 2015. To address the above question, four new indicators were used to compare descriptive differences in stratified sets, and both linear regression model analysis and robustness testing were applied to further explore the relationships. Our main results showed that being a cover paper has positive and significant relationships both with citations and usage counts. Moreover, additional analyses show that the two relationships are strengthened in top-tier journals, and the main effects remain robust when we consider the influence of author ability. This new exploration of factors relevant for citations and usage counts in this empirical analysis consolidates and broadens the findings of previous studies.

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Notes

  1. The 2016 version is the earliest version (https://www.natureindex.com/annual-tables/2016/institution/all/life-sciences); it is based on Nature Index data from 1 January 2015 to 31 December 2015. The top 20 institutions listed: Harvard University, National Institutes of Health, Stanford University, Max Planck Society, Yale University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, University of California San Francisco, Chinese Academy of Sciences, University of California San Diego, University of Pennsylvania, University of Oxford, French National Centre for Scientific Research, Johns Hopkins University, University of Toronto, University of Cambridge, Columbia University in the City of New York, University of Michigan, Duke University, University of Washington, and University of California, Berkeley.

  2. A detailed journal list can be retrieved from the website (https://www.natureindex.com/faq#subjects). The top-tier journals in our sample include Cell, Nature Medicine, Cancer Cell, Cell Stem Cell, Cell Metabolism, Molecular Cell, Science Translational Medicine, Nature Structural & Molecular Biology, Genes & Development, Developmental Cell, Journal of Cell Biology, and Current Biology.

  3. It should be noted that 239,184 papers include 39,848 primary data and 199,336 supplementary data.

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Acknowledgements

This research was supported by the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (Nos. WK2040000046, WK2040000045) and Anhui Province Postdoctoral Research Funding Project (No. 2021B542). The author would like to thank the editors and anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments and suggestions, which helped us improve the paper.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Management, International Institute of Finance, University of Science and Technology of China, 96 Jinzhai Road, Hefei, 230026, People’s Republic of China

    Yezhu Wang, Yundong Xie & Lu Guo

  2. School of Humanities and Social Science, University of Science and Technology of China, 96 Jinzhai Road, Hefei, 230026, People’s Republic of China

    Dong Wang & Rongting Zhou

  3. School of Humanities, Hefei Normal University, Hefei, 230061, People’s Republic of China

    Lu Guo

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  1. Yezhu Wang
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Correspondence to Yundong Xie.

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Appendix

Appendix

See Table 9.

Table 9 The ten topics chosen based on Latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA)
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Wang, Y., Xie, Y., Wang, D. et al. Do cover papers get better citations and usage counts? An analysis of 42 journals in cell biology. Scientometrics 127, 3793–3813 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-022-04444-0

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