Are citation counts of articles related to outcomes and legacies of authors and journal editors? (CAROL): a cohort study

Objective: To investigate the association between the number of citations each article received and quantitative factors of journal editors or corresponding authors. Methods: We performed retrospective cohort study using corresponding author and editor information of articles published in PLOS Medicine. The number of citations for each article and several factors associated with the participants, which were expected to influence citation counts, were acquired from Web of Science as follows: citations of publications, H-index, gross national income per capita of the affiliation country, number of publications, duration of research career, and number of publications from the affiliation of each corresponding author and their handling editor. Article citations in continuous and binary values and quantitative factors of journal editors or corresponding authors were investigated. In binary values, a super-citation article was defined as one in the top 12.24% of citations among the included articles, while the rest were defined as normal-citation articles. Results: Articles published in PLOS Medicine between 2018 and 2019 were analyzed (n=396). In the analysis using continuous values, the citation count of the article was weakly correlated with the journal editor’s citation count of publications (Spearman correlation, 0.164), H-index (0.161), and the number of publications from their affiliation (0.148). Similarly, weak correlations were observed with the corresponding author’s citation count of publications (0.217), H-index (0.158), and the number of publications (0.103). However, in binary analysis, the super-citation articles were only associated with the editor’s H-index (P-value in Mann-Whitney U test, 0.048). Conclusions: Although article citation counts are weakly correlated with the quantitative factors of the corresponding author or the journal editor, only the journal editor’s H-index is associated with the super-citation articles, which greatly contributes to the journal’s impact factor. This Citation counts of Articles Related to Outcomes and Legacies of authors and journal editors (CAROL) study suggests that the editor’s expertise is crucial in selecting breakthrough and widely popular articles.