Comparing citation numbers between articles at two stages of a Model Organism Database curation workflow

Abstract

Model organism databases (MODs) facilitate the connections between published research papers with genes and other biological information. MODs aim to make research data easier to access to the research community, especially for researchers relying on genetic data and other information about a specific species. This paper follows previous research (Beradini, et al. 2016) that attempted to use quantitative data to determine if and how literature curated by a MOD makes a difference to the access and reuse of the curated data. The research addresses whether articles that have been through the detailed curation process of a MOD are more likely to be cited when compared to 'similar' articles that are not curated. For this research, citations for articles curated by FlyBase, a MOD for genetic and molecular data for the Drosophilidae insect family, were compared with articles identified as having similar genetic and molecular data, but not yet given a detailed curation by FlyBase. In addition, citation counts from a larger set of articles retrieved through a title and keyword search for Drosophilidae are also compared.