OBJECTIVES: Scientific journals are increasingly offering digital enhancements, such as plain language summaries (PLS), graphical abstracts and author-narrated videos, to be published alongside their articles. These enhancements aim to communicate key findings to a range of target audiences, and are thought to increase understanding and interest in the article. Here, we explored whether digital enhancements increased an article’s number of citations.

METHODS: 12 issues (Jan – Dec 2022) from two open-access journals focusing on two different therapeutic areas, were reviewed to identify the number of articles published with/without enhancements. Both journals facilitated digital enhancements by providing author guidelines for enhancements and embedding enhancements in the related online articles. The artificial intelligence tool, Scite (https://scite.ai), was accessed to retrieve citation information on the published articles on 30/01/2024. Standalone podcast articles were excluded from analysis. Health Economic Outcomes Research (HEOR) articles were identified based on title and abstract. The main outcome of interest was number of citations in other publications.

RESULTS: 337 articles were assessed (217 original research [OR], 59 review, 61 other), of which 49 included digital enhancements. 14.5% of all articles had associated digital enhancements (13.8% in OR and 13.6% in review articles). PLS was the most common type of enhancement (10.4%). Overall, articles with enhancements were cited more often versus articles without enhancements (mean: 6.35 vs 4.13, respectively; p=0.002). This was the case for OR articles (6.60 vs 3.79; p=0.001), review articles (9.38 vs 5.78; p=0.038), and HEOR-related articles (4.84 [n=19] vs 3.99 [n=94]; p=0.417) with and without enhancements, respectively.

CONCLUSIONS: Our results suggest that inclusion of digital enhancements, embedded in the online article, may have a positive impact on article reach and impact. This emphasizes the benefit of including digital enhancements, easily accessed in the online article, for original research, review articles, and HEOR publications.