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.

A description of the methods used to create these datasets is detailed in Gelzer et al. - Getting Cited Early: Influence of Visibility Strategies, Structure, and Focal System on Early Citation Rates. See below for a general description and metadata.

Final Dataset (.csv)- We generated a database of all articles published in JWM between 2011 and 2015

uid = unique identifier for each article
title = title of the article; journal = Journal of Wildlife Management
issue = issue number of the article
volume = volume number of the article
pages = the page numbers of the article
date = month the article was published (in print, otherwise the online publication month was used)
year = year the article was published (in print, otherwise the online publication year was used)
authors = the names of the authors of the article
keywords = the article's keywords
doi = digital object identifier (DOI)
no_authors = the number of authors of the article
no_words = total number of words in the article
length_no_pages = number of pages of the article
date_first_published = date article was first published (either online or print)
no_refs = the number of references in the article
no_words_abs = number of words in the abstract of the article
no_figs = number of figures in the article
no_table = number of tables in the article
date_published = date published in print (otherwise the date published online)
days_from_online2publication = the number of days between online publication and print publication
days2first_citation = the number of days to the first citation
cites_1stYR = total number of citations received by the article within a year after the article was published
cites_2ndYR = total number of citations received by the article within the first two years after the article was published
cites_5thYR = total number of citations received by the article within the first five years after the article was published
selfcites_1stYR = total number of self-citations (i.e., one or more authors [based on last name only] from the original JWM article were also present in the author line of a citing publication) received by the article within a year after the article was published
selfcites_2ndYR = total number of self-citations received by the article within the first two years after the article was published
selfcites_5thYR =  total number of self-citations received by the article within the first five years after the article was published
selfcite_1stCite = 0 if the first citation was not a self-citation, 1 if the first citation was a self-citation
hits_curr_yr = number of articles published in the article’s publication year that contained the article’s keywords
hits_prev_yr = number of articles published in the year directly preceeding the article’s publication year that contained the focal article’s keywords
no_keywords = number of keywords in the article
hits_curr_yr_perKeyword = hits_curr_yr / the total number of keywords of the article
hits_prev_yr_perKeyword = hits_prev_yr / the total number of keywords of the article
hits_trend = difference between hits_curr_yr_perKeyword and hits_prev_yr_perKeyword to provide an index of whether the number of articles containing the article’s keywords was increasing or decreasing over time
open_access = whether the article was open access (1) or not (0)
taxa = the primary taxon or taxa of interest (large mammals [>~14 kg], small mammals, herpetofauna, birds, and multiple taxa [i.e., article studied more than 1 of the previous taxa])
no_species = the number of species in the focal analysis (i.e., number of species in the lowest taxonomic classification)
location = which continent or continents the study occurred on (US, NothAmerica_Other, Africa, Antarctica, Asia, Australia, Europe, South America, Multiple, Other, None)
alt_metric = the Altmetric Attention Score at the time manually extracted (July 2020)
no_figs_color = the number of figures in the article that were in color
type_manual = type of article as determined by methods outlined in Gelzer et al. (in progress). Options include commentary, human dimensions, methods, review, or normal (i.e., research article)
type_JWM = type of article determined by JWM (research article, note, population ecology, habitat relations, management and conservation, tools and technology article, human dimensions, density dependence special section, management and conservation article, demographics of reintroduction special section, multimodel inference special section)
methods_paper = whether the article was a methods paper (1) or not (0)
multiple_taxa = whether the article included multiple taxa (1) or not (0)
NorthAmerica = whether the article's research was conducted on North America (1) or not (0)
Multiple_continents = whether the article's research was conducted on multiple continents (1) or not (0)
species_morethan2 = whether the number of focal species included in the article (number of the lowest taxonomic classification) was greater than two (1) or not (0)
days2first_nonself_citation = number of days to the first non-self-citation (i.e., an article authored by none of the authors of the focal article)
days2first_self_citation = number of days to the first self-citation
fig_proportion = the proportion of figures in color
altMetricBin = if the Altmetric Attention score was a 0 (0) or greater (1)

Citing Dataset (.csv)- We generated a database of all the articles that cited the published JWM articles we used for our analysis between 2011 and 2015

cite_link = the citing articles DOI link
uid = unique identifier for the original JWM article
doi_orig = DOI link for the original JWM article
cite_title = title of the citing article
cite_authors = author names of the citing article
cite_date = the date the citing article cited one of the original JWM articles