Availability of web servers significantly boosts citations rates of bioinformatics methods for protein function and disorder prediction

Motivation: Development of bioinformatics methods is a long, complex and resource-hungry process. Hundreds of these tools were released. While some methods are highly cited and used, many suffer relatively low citation rates. We empirically analyze a large collection of recently released methods in three diverse protein function and disorder prediction areas to identify key factors that contribute to increased citations. Results: We show that provision of a working web server significantly boosts citation rates. On average, methods with working web servers generate three times as many citations compared to tools that are available as only source code, have no code and no server, or are no longer available. This observation holds consistently across different research areas and publication years. We also find that differences in predictive performance are unlikely to impact citation rates. Overall, our empirical results suggest that a relatively low-cost investment into the provision and long-term support of web servers would substantially increase the impact of bioinformatics tools.