Does open data promote the impact of research articles in psychology?

Open data are increasingly promoted as a key mechanism to enhance transparency and reproducibility in science. Yet, empirical evidence on the impact of open data practices in specific disciplines remains limited. In this study, we ask whether sharing research data enhances the citation impact of psychology publications. Drawing on 3319 articles from four leading psychology journals, we employ a multi-layered causal inference framework to control for confounding factors and address selection bias. Our analysis reveals that, after accounting for other factors influencing citations, articles with open data receive 20% more citations on average. We also observe that the citation advantage is especially pronounced for non-open-access publications, unfunded research, internationally collaborative work, and articles from high-reputation authors. These findings offer robust evidence for the benefits of open data sharing in psychology and support policy efforts to incentivize data transparency. This study represents one of the first comprehensive investigations into the citation impact of open data within this field.