Beschreibung:
<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title><jats:p>Elucidating factors that contribute to citation rates of scientific articles can help scientists write manuscripts that have a stronger influence on their scientific field and are accessible to a broad audience. Using a cohort of 778 articles published in <jats:italic>The Journal of Wildlife Management</jats:italic> from 2011–2015, we examined how visibility strategies, article structure, and focal system (all factors authors can predominantly control) influenced the accumulation of citations over various time frames within the first 5 years after publication, and the number of days until an article received its first citation. Visibility strategies (e.g., open access, increasing the Altmetric Attention Score, and self‐citations) all influenced the number of citations accrued following publication. Citations were more stochastic 1 year following publication compared to 5 years following publication, with only 20.1% of papers receiving a citation after 1 year compared to 92.5% of papers receiving a citation after 5 years. Our model explained much more of the variation after 5 years compared to after only 1 year (<jats:italic>R</jats:italic><jats:sup>2</jats:sup> = 0.57 and 0.12, respectively). The number of factors significantly associated with citation rates increased as the timeframe of our analysis increased. After 5 years, factors associated with article structure (e.g., number of references), focal system (e.g., methods papers), and visibility all increased citation counts of papers. Our work suggests citation rates within wildlife ecology are influenced by a number of controllable factors, and that authors pursuing a variety of visibility strategies can increase the influence of an article on science and management.</jats:p>