Qual o impacto de dados abertos para a produção científica sobre Odonata?

Abstract

Currently, science is facing a replicability crisis due to a lack of transparency and rigour in research methods. One possible solution to this is the adoption of the principles of open science, which includes the sharing of data, code, and analysis scripts. This study investigated whether the use of open science practices influences scientific publications in the field of Zoology, specifically in terms of the number of citations. To do this, articles from the digital repository Dryad were collected and found through a search using the keyword "Odonata." The study compared the effect of open data and access on scientific publications. The data was processed in R and the number of citations was used as a measure to evaluate the impact of data availability in open format. The paired T-test was conducted to compare the number of citations of articles with data published in Dryad to the median of the citations of other articles published in the same journal, volume, and edition. 44 articles were obtained in Dryad, but 19 of them were discarded due to inconsistencies. The remaining catalogued articles, but which do not have data in Dryad, amount to 335 articles. The paired T-test did not show statistically significant evidence that the publication of open data on the Dryad platform had any impact on the number of citations of the articles. This result was different from previous studies, but it is important to consider that the number of variables analysed in this study differs from others. These variables may have influenced the number of citations. It is possible that the impact of open data on scientific production may be smaller in specific areas of study, as occurred in this study on Odonata. This may be due to the restricted scope of the research and the relatively small ecosystem of researchers. In addition, using the number of citations as a metric to evaluate the impact of scientific work may have influenced the results, as it does not consider other forms of use of scientific research. Using alternative metrics, such as altmetrics, may provide a different view of this data.