The main purpose of this research project is to share original data and computational codes that allowed us to understand the role that [Sci-Hub][1] has on the number of papers citations.
Previously, we found that scientific productivity (i.e., number of papers published in scientific journals) in basic sciences and engineering has a significant positive effect on the economic complexity of countries. Although this relationship proved to be clear and stable only for high-income countries, low-income economies did not exhibit this same pattern (Laverde-Rojas and Correa, 2019).
This result was somehow thought-provoking to us. Why? Because we know from other branches of the scientific literature, that the use of Sci-Hub has increased significantly during recent years (Bohannon, 2016), allowing all countries to have access to scientific literature for free (Till et al. 2019). If low-income economies cannot pay websites that provide subscription-based access to large databases of scientific research, such as the Elsevier's Platform ScienceDirect®, then their economic competitiveness might be hindered from this fact. Needless to mention the possibility that the business model that relies on the toll access to scientific literature may become unsustainable (Strielkowski, 2017).
As Sci-Hub provides access to nearly all scholarly literature for free (Himmelstein et al., 2018), we thought that its use might be critical for developing countries to increase their scientific productivity.
Our goal, therefore, is to shed some lights in conducting preliminary analyses regarding the implications of Sci-Hub use on papers citations. According to Laverde-Rojas and Correa (2019) "increasing the number of scientifc papers in diferent disciplines is undoubtedly a necessary step for achieving the required diversifcation that leads nations to scientifc competitiveness
worldwide, but this diversifcation works with a large number of citations and a higher efort on R&D projects that require a higher percentage expense concerning countries GDP"
**REFERENCES**
Bohannon, J. (2016). Who’s downloading pirated papers? everyone. *Science* *352*, 508–512.
Himmelstein, D. S., Romero, A. R., Levernier, J. G., Munro, T. A., McLaughlin, S. R., Tzovaras, B. G., & Greene, C. S. (2018). Sci-Hub provides access to nearly all scholarly literature. *ELife*, *7*, e32822.
Laverde-Rojas, H., & Correa, J. C. (2019). Can scientific productivity impact the economic complexity of countries?. *Scientometrics*, *120*(1), 267-282. DOI: 10.1007/s11192-019-03118-8
Strielkowski, W. (2017). Will the rise of Sci-Hub pave the road for the subscription-based access to publishing databases?. *Information development*, *33*(5), 540-542.
Till, B. M., Rudolfson, N., Saluja, S., Gnanaraj, J., Samad, L., Ljungman, D., & Shrime, M. (2019). Who is pirating medical literature? A bibliometric review of 28 million Sci-Hub downloads. *The Lancet Global Health*, *7*(1), e30-e31.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sci-Hub
