Do First-Articles in a Journal Issue Get More Cited?

Introduction As the advice of peers on the quality of a submitted paper prior to publication, peer review can be regarded as the pre-publication evaluation. Bibliographic citations of scientific papers used as indicators of the visibility, impact, and quality of scientific publications, could be regarded as the post-publication evaluation. Intentionally or not, journal editors often put the accepted manuscript with nice comments by peer reviewers at the top of all papers in an issue. The First-Articles of journal issues are generally regarded with higher importance, intense creativity or superior quality through peer review process. Judge A, Cable M, Colbert E (2007) deemed that journal editors placed the best paper in the " pole position " , and they confirmed this anecdotal evidence further in their study. Specifically, 75% of 16 journals indicated that quality played some primary role in selection of the first articles. Wang (2015) also admitted that journals would choose the very best paper of an issue on the cover, " a paper that in 20 year's time might win a Nobel Prize " , according to the opinion of Stang, the EIC of Journal of the American Chemical society (Ritter 2006). Since there are evidences that peer reviewers can successfully discriminate between manuscripts that have a greater chance to be cited in future. Further, in this sense, we made a hypothesis that the best articles selected by peer reviews—usually the First-Articles, will be superior in receiving higher citations after publication. In this paper we will illustrate how peer review and the performance of journal papers measured by bibliometric indicators could concordance with each other. In particular, we examined whether there were obvious citation differences between First-Articles and non-First-Articles published in the same issue of a journal.