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

function of the time post-publication from year 0 to year 12. We present the corresponding graph on Fig 2. Error bars are classically calculated as σ/(N^0.5), with σ the standard deviation and N the sample size. In Table 1, we give the number of values used to calculate each point (depending on the number of available articles, see Fig 1). On the same figure we drew the average annual amount of citations for the articles in the ‘‘Biodiversity Conservation” (BC) category of WoS. We also drew the citation history for the articles from the VN journal group. The average citation history profile of these two groups of standard (non citizen science based) research articles shows an increase in the amount of annual citations during the first 4 years after publications to reach a plateau of about 3 cita- tions/year from year 4 up to year 12 post-publication. The average citation history of Vigie- Nature articles seems to follow a similar profile, but with an ‘‘excess” of citations from 0 to 12 years post-publication. To test the significance of this effect, we led a longitudinal analysis of the citation history (see the ‘‘Method” section for details). Using a multivariate regression (to fit the data with a polynomial function using a maximum likelihood estimation), we first tested if the VN and BC profiles are significantly distinct. To do so, we compared two models in their Fig 2. Comparative citation rate history. We plotted the average citation history for Vigie-Nature’s articles (blue,

total sample size: 123 articles), for the ‘Biodiversity and Conservation’ articles from WoS (red, sample size: 60847 articles), and for the articles from the Vigie-Nature journals group (black, sample size: 78988 articles). https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0258350.g002 Table 1. Sample size corresponding to the Vigie-Nature curve in Fig 1 (points from 0 to 12 years). 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 N 123 120 109 99 93 80 70 55 37 30 19 13 6 https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0258350.t001 PLOS ONE A citation study of a biodiversity citizen science program PLOS ONE | https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0258350 October 11, 2021 6 / 13