AsianScientist (May 22, 2017) – Having your research paper featured on the cover of a journal can boost the number of citations it receives, according to a study published in Public Understanding of Science.
In the 1930s, philosopher Martin Heidegger proposed that we are moving toward an era of the image. Now, whenever we look at mobile phones, computers, TV, books or magazines, we are inundated with images. We might guess, however, that the primacy of text would be preserved in the ivory towers of scientific research.
However, this study suggests that this is not the case. A team of researchers led by Dr. Wang Guoyan at the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) performed a statistical analysis of how frequently articles featured on the cover of top tier journals were cited. Using data from the Web of Science, Wang and her team compared the citation rates of cover articles and non-cover articles published in the ‘CNS’ journals: Cell, Nature and Science.
They found that the more influential a periodical is, the more likely it is to have images on its cover. There are disciplinary differences too; the rate of image-based covers rises through the sequence: mathematics, observational astronomy, physics, chemistry, and biology. However, the rarity of images on the covers of mathematics journals is not a consequence of its content; after all, fractal art, chaos theory and the golden section all originate from mathematics.
In general, papers published in the prestigious CNS journals enjoyed 120 percent of the citation of comparable researchers. However, when a research paper is represented by the journal’s cover image, the relative number of citations is over 200 percent.
“Being published in these journals is good for citations; but being on the cover is even better,” Wang said.
Cover images include scientific images but also visual art about science. This art is usually not created by the author of the paper, but by third-party artists. The department of Science Communication in USTC, noted Wang, has a professional team that works on such science visualizations.
So, scientists looking for citations should be alert to the power of the visual, and look out for potential cover images, or budget for a visualization professional in their grant application, she added.
The article can be found at: Wang et al. (2017) Cover Stories: An Emerging Aesthetic of Prestige Science.
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Source: Chinese Academy of Sciences.
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