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

ability to fit the data (see the Methods section for details). This test gives a p-value of 0.005. We thus accept the hypothesis that taking into account the origin of the paper improves the fit: in other words, we conclude that the difference between the Vigie-Nature citation history and the Biodiversity and conservation one is significant with a risk inferior to 5%. We performed the same test to compare VN and VN journals articles. We found a p-value<10−5, which shows that the Vigie-Nature citation history is also significantly distinct from the VN journals one. In addition, it seems that this difference in the time-series of yearly citations grows with time. In the next sub-section we explore the hypothesis that the relative long-term impact of Vigie-Nature articles (compared to standard ones) is higher than their relative short-term impact. Evolution of the relative amount of citations of Vigie-Nature articles In order to visualize this time-dependant ‘‘excess” of citations, we computed the average rela- tive amount (R) of Vigie-Nature annual citations, as explained in the Methods section: for each VN article, the number of citation is divided by the average annual citations of the papers published in the corresponding journal, as a function of time (Fig 3). The results indicate that the average relative amount of citations for VN articles seems to be superior to 1 from 0 to 12 years, which is coherent with our previous analysis. Furthermore, it seems that the ‘‘excess” of citations of VN articles grows with time, at least between 0 and 11 years. Indeed, the ratio after

11 years is significantly higher that the ratio between 0 and 4 years (3.3 against about 1.4). This Fig 3. Average relative yearly citation rate of the Vigie-Nature articles. We plotted the relative amount of annual citation of Vigie-Nature articles with respect to the ensemble of articles published in the same journals during the same year. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0258350.g003 PLOS ONE A citation study of a biodiversity citizen science program PLOS ONE | https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0258350 October 11, 2021 7 / 13