Model Organism Database Citation Analysis

In our research, we have been addressing the effects of having scholarly articles curated by model organism databases (MODs) on the likelihood of those articles being cited. Literature curation by model organism databases results in the interconnection of papers, genes, gene functions, and other experimentally supported biological information, and aims to make research data more discoverable and accessible to the research community. If articles and their corresponding data are easier to find, then we might expect that curated articles would exhibit different citation profiles when compared to articles that are not curated. Therefore, we have been comparing the citation behavior of different groups of articles and asking the following questions:

1. Given a collection of 'similar' articles that are about Arabidopsis, is there a difference in the citation numbers between articles that have been curated in TAIR and ones that have not?

2. If there are differences, can they be characterized by amount and time?

3. Given articles that have been curated in TAIR and the date it was curated, is there a difference in the citation behavior after it was curated?

4. Given the articles above, is there a difference in citation behavior of curated articles selected by the TAIR staff and articles selected by the community?