A few years ago, researchers would find considerable hurdles when attempting to study citation patterns to illuminate trends in a field, identify new areas of research interest or pinpoint questionable practices such as excessive self-citation. Now, a new initiative has changed all that, making it easier for researchers to access this data, study it, share it, and make the subsequent work available for others to build on. Yet, I argue that publishers still need to go further. The editorial comment piece was published by Nature.
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