  How do the level of usage of an article, the timeframe of its usage and its
subject area relate to the number of citations it accrues? This paper aims to
answer this question through an observational study of usage and citation data
collected about the multidisciplinary, open access mega-journal Scientific
Reports. This observational study answers these questions using the following
methods: an overlap analysis of most read and top-cited articles; Spearman
correlation tests between total citation counts over two years and usage over
various timeframes; a comparison of first months of citation for most read and
all articles; a Wilcoxon test on the distribution of total citations of early
cited articles and the distribution of total citations of all other articles.
All analyses were performed using the programming language R. As Scientific
Reports is a multidisciplinary journal covering all natural and clinical
sciences, we also looked at the differences across subjects. We found a
moderate correlation between usage in the first year and citations in the first
two years since publication, and that articles with high usage in the first 6
months are more likely to have their first citation earlier (Wilcoxon=1811500,
p < 0.0001), which is also related to higher citations in the first two years
(Wilcoxon=8071200, p < 0.0001). As this final assertion is inferred based on
the results of the other elements of this paper, it requires further analysis.
Moreover, our choice of a 2 year window for our analysis did not consider the
articles' citation half-life, and our use of Scientific Reports (a journal that
is atypical compared to most academic journals) as the source of the articles
analysed has likely played a role in our findings, and so analysing a longer
timeframe and carrying out similar analysis on a different journal (or group of
journals) may lead to different conclusions.
