Data Sharing and Citation Impact in Visual Search Research: A Bibliometric Extension of Godwin et al. (2025)

In the wake of psychology’s credibility revolution, open science practices such as data sharing have become more prevalent, yet researchers often cite a lack of professional incentives as a barrier to adoption. Building on a recent systematic audit of the visual search and eye-movement literature by Godwin et al. (2025), this report examines whether data sharing is associated with increased scholarly impact.We extended the dataset curated by Godwin et al. with bibliometric metadata from the OpenAlex registry and compared citation impact between articles that did and did not share data. Articles that shared data showed a small but significant advantage in field-weighted citation impact. Analyses of citation dynamics further indicated that this advantage was concentrated in the first four years post-publication and attenuated thereafter. In addition, citation impact did not vary as a function of data granularity: sharing fine-grained fixation-level data did not confer greater benefit than sharing coarser participant-level summaries.Although the analyses are observational and do not support causal inference, the findings suggest that data sharing is associated with a modest professional advantage, consistent with broader evidence linking open science practices to both individual recognition and cumulative scientific progress.