Data From: Getting cited early: influence of visibility strategies, structure, and focal system on early citation rates

Elucidating factors that contribute to citation rates of scientific articles can help scientists write manuscripts that have a stronger influence on their scientific field and wildlife management, and are accessible to a broad audience. Using a cohort of 778 articles published in The Journal of Wildlife Management from 2011–2015, we examined how visibility strategies (e.g., open access, increasing the Atlmetric Attention Score, self-citations), article structure, and focal system – all factors authors can predominantly control – influenced the accumulation of citations over various time frames within the first 5 years after publication, and the number of days until an article received its first citation. Visibility strategies influenced the number of citations accrued within the first year following publication. Our model explained less of the variation in number of citations received 1 year post-publication compared to 5 years post-publication (R² increased from 0.12 to 0.57 from years 1 to 5). Two years post-publication, factors associated with an article's visibility increased citation counts, and factors associated with article structure and focal system became important. Our analyses suggest citation rates, within wildlife ecology, are influenced by a number of controllable factors and that the influence of an article on science and management can be increased by authors pursuing a variety of visibility strategies.