Os artigos academicos pirateados são mais citados?

Sci-Hub Downloads Boost Article Citations -- And Help Academic Publishers, por Glyn Moody, no TechDirt:

Techdirt readers know that Sci-Hub is a site offering free online access to a large proportion of all the scientific research papers that have been published -- at the time of writing, it claims to hold 82,605,245 of them. It's an incredible resource, used by millions around the world. Those include students whose institutions can't afford the often pricey journal subscriptions, but also many academics in well-funded universities, who do have institutional access to the papers. (...)

So irrespective of the legal situation, an interesting question is: what effect do Sci-Hub downloads have on article citations? That's precisely what a new preprint, published on arXiv, seeks to answer. (...)

Assuming that those are representative, and that the statistical calculations are correct, the end result is important. It suggests that articles that are downloaded from Sci-Hub are nearly twice as likely to be cited as those that aren't -- a big boost that will doubtless be of great interest to academics, whose careers are greatly affected by how widely they are cited. It seems to confirm that Sci-Hub does indeed help spread knowledge, not just in terms of the free downloads it offers, but also by virtue of leading to more citations for downloaded papers, and thus a wider audience for them.

The Sci-hub Effect: Sci-hub downloads lead to more article citations, por J.C. Correa, H. Laverde-Rojas, F. Marmolejo-Ramos, J. Tejada e Š. Bahník (arXiv):

Citations are often used as a metric of the impact of scientific publications. Here, we examine how the number of downloads from Sci-hub as well as various characteristics of publications and their authors predicts future citations. Using data from 12 leading journals in economics, consumer research, neuroscience, and multidisciplinary research, we found that articles downloaded from Sci-hub were cited 1.72 times more than papers not downloaded from Sci-hub and that the number of downloads from Sci-hub was a robust predictor of future citations. Among other characteristics of publications, the number of figures in a manuscript consistently predicts its future citations. The results suggest that limited access to publications may limit some scientific research from achieving its full impact.

Interrogo-me se não poderá haver outra relação causal - os artigos potencialmente mais interessantes serem simultaneamente os mais pirateados e os mais citados.