The National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute data: analyzing published articles that used BioLINCC open access data

Background: Data sharing is now a mandatory prerequisite for several major funders and journals, where researchers are obligated to deposit the data resulting from their studies in an openly accessible repository. Biomedical open data are now widely available in almost all disciplines, where researchers can freely access and reuse these data in new studies. We aim to study the BioLINCC datasets, number of publications that used BioLINCC open access data, and the citations received by these publications. Methods: As of July 2019, there was a total of 194 datasets stored in BioLINCC repository and accessible through their portal. We requested the full list of publications that used these datasets from BioLINCC, and we also performed a supplementary PubMed search for other publications. We used Web of Science (WoS) to analyze the characteristics of publications and the citations they received, where WoS database index high quality articles. Results: 1,086 published articles used data from BioLINCC repository for 79 (40.72%) datasets, where 115 (59.28%) datasets did not have any publications associated with it. Of the total publications, 987 (90.88%) articles were WoS indexed. The number of publications has steadily increased since 2002 and peaked in 2018 with a total number of 138 publications on that year. The 987 open data publications (i.e., secondary publications) received a total of 34,181 citations up to 1 (st) October 2019. The average citation per item for the open data publications was 34.63. The total number of citations received by open data publications per year has increased from only 2 citations in 2002, peaking in 2018 with 2361 citations. Conclusion: Majority of BioLINCC datasets were not used in secondary publications. Despite that, the datasets used for secondary publications yielded publications in WoS indexed journals and are receiving an increasing number of citations.