Scientific articles that get downloaded from the scholarly piracy website Sci-Hub tend to receive more citations, according to a new study published in Scientometrics. The number of times an article was downloaded from Sci-Hub also turned out to be a robust predictor of future citations.
“Our main motivation for doing this paper was to reveal the importance of having access to scientific knowledge in general and understand the impact of Sci-Hub in terms of the number of citations a paper receives, in particular,” said study author Juan C. Correa, an interdisciplinary researcher who will soon be affiliated with the CESA School of Business in Bogotá, Colombia.
“As a researcher, I know that in general scholars in developed countries have no problem accessing a paper published in any scientific journal. Nonetheless, researchers in non-developed countries face great difficulties in accessing them. That’s why we quote the work of Irwin Louis Horowitz, who was probably the first scientist who talked about access to published scientific knowledge,” Correa explained.
For their study, the researchers examined 8,661 scientific articles published in three multidisciplinary journals (Nature, Science, and Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences), three economic journals (The Quarterly Journal of Economics, Journal of Political Economy, and Econometrica), three consumer research journals (Journal of Consumer Research, Journal of Retailing and Consumer Services, and Journal of Consumer Psychology), and three neuroscience journals (Nature Reviews Neuroscience, Nature Neuroscience, and Neuron).
The articles were published between September 2015 and February 2016. About half of them had been downloaded from Sci-Hub, while the other half had never been downloaded from the website.
The researchers found that articles downloaded from Sci-Hub were cited more frequently compared to articles not downloaded from Sci-Hub. After controlling for variables such as the number of figures included in a paper, title length, the number of authors per article, the H-index of the first author, and the impact factor of the journal, Correa and his colleagues found that articles downloaded from Sci-Hub were cited 1.72 times more frequently on average.
“We showed that articles accessed through Sci-Hub systematically received more citations than papers not downloaded from Sci-Hub. Up to the best of our knowledge, this is the first endeavor that shows an empirical estimate of the relationship between Sci-Hub downloads and citations,” the researchers said.
“We coined the term ‘scholar consumption’ (i.e., using websites that provide subscription-based access to massive databases of scientific research), and we contrasted it with the use of pirate websites such as Library Genesis, Paperhub, or Sci-Hub as equivalent means to access scientific literature,” Correa added. “Our comparison was inspired by the paper titled ‘Who’s downloading pirated papers?‘ that John Bohannon published in Science back in 2016.”
The new findings have some implications for “the traditional business model that relies on subscriptions to journals,” Correa told PsyPost. “While some scholars think that this business model may become unsustainable in the future, we think that Sci-Hub, paradoxically, may help preserve the current publishing system.”
“The lack of access to publications, which preprints and open access journals are trying to solve, may no longer be felt so strongly to find required increasing support. In any case, the existence of pirate websites represents an important factor for journals to rethink their commercial policies in terms of granting access to scientific literature.”
But future research should examine a larger set of scientific journals, Correa said. “It is necessary to prove the consistency of our statistical results for more disciplines, journals, and regions,” he explained. “We provided our data, computational codes, and analyses in an open science repository (https://osf.io/8c632/) to facilitate further analyses to those interested in the scientific community and we look forward to hearing more about this topic in the near future.”
The study, “The Sci-Hub effect on papers’ citations“, was authored by Juan C. Correa, Henry Laverde-Rojas, Julian Tejada, and Fernando Marmolejo-Ramos.