Measuring epistemic success of a biodiversity citizen science program: A citation study

of the yearly citation profile (time = 0 years). However, we suggest that it rapidly attenuates after this point. Besides, we suggest that this effect operates similarly for the Vigie-Nature sam- ples and for the comparison groups of papers. S1 Appendix presents simulation results which strengthen the relevance of this approximation. This set of data was compared with the citation history of three bibliographic ensembles. The first one consists of the articles published between 2007 and 2019 and referenced in WoS in the category ‘‘Biodiversity Conservation” (sample size: 60847 articles, hereafter BC group of articles). This sample was constituted by using the filters ‘‘Biodiversity Conservation” (as a WoS category), ‘‘2007–2019”, and ‘‘Article” (as document type). For every publication year, the annual citation rate of these articles were then extracted by creating a ‘‘citation report” in WoS. This citation report contains, for a given year, the total number of articles under the BC category, and the yearly number of citations from 2007 to 2019. These data are given in S3 Appendix. We then computed an average citation rate per year post-publication following the same methods as the one used for Vigie-Nature (VN) articles. The second set of data includes all the articles published between 2007 and 2019 within the ensemble of scientific journals where the Vigie-Nature articles are published (hereafter, VN journals groups). To build Fig 3, the citation history of every VN article was compared to the

average citation history of the articles published in the corresponding journal. More precisely, for each article A from the Vigie-Nature bibliography, published in the journal J during the year Y, and which got, t years after publication, a number of citations NA(t), we computed R = NA(t)/Nj(t), with Nj(t) being the average number of citations t years after publication of the articles in the journal J during the same year Y. This ratio R represents, for each VN article, its relative amount of citations compared with the whole publications in the same journal. Journals’ citation histories are easily extracted from WoS by creating a ‘‘citation report” (after Fig 1. Number of Vigie-Nature articles per year of publication. NB: At the time of our analysis, the whole data for 2019 were not yet available, which explains the relative low number of articles for this year. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0258350.g001 PLOS ONE A citation study of a biodiversity citizen science program PLOS ONE | https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0258350 October 11, 2021 4 / 13