

An easy way to boost a paper's citations: Cite and you shall be cited - DVassallo
http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100813/full/news.2010.406.html

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jacobolus
It seems quite possible to me that paper quality is correlated with both
number of references and number of subsequent citations?

I hate when statistical analyses that turn up correlations are summarized by
stories implying a causal link: in this case, “reciprocal altruism”, and even
worse, “a single extra reference in an article now _producing_ , on average, a
whole additional citation for the referencing paper” (my emphasis), which
doesn’t seem at all proven to me. Everything the researcher himself says is of
course either completely noncommittal (“If you want to get more cited, the
answer could be to cite more people”) or else a platitude (“Scientists are
subject to social forces as much as anyone in any other profession” ....
really now??!).

To discover a causal link here would require artificially and intentionally
(but without telling anyone) adjusting the number of citations in some random
set of papers to be published (probably by including or leaving out minor or
tangential citations), and then seeing how one group compares to the other in
the future.

My speculation about reasons (other than learned altruism) the amount of
correlation between references and citations might have changed over time: (1)
newer papers are in general treading in more developed fields, in which the
top researchers must be familiar with a broader set of previous papers, (2)
dissemination of papers is easier than it ever was before and so for example
when reading a paper it is trivial to track down all of the papers it
references and then cite those directly, (3) expectations about the proper
number of citations in a paper have changed over time and modern journal
reviewers especially in respected journals are stricter about suggesting that
authors cite every previously known idea, (4) relatedly, academia has become
increasingly bureaucratically output-driven and so individual researchers are
writing more (presumably smaller-individual-impact) papers, (5) if number of
citations is increasing over time, and in general most works are cited most
often in the few years after their publication, the whole structure operates
somewhat like a ponzi scheme, where each generation of papers provides more
citations to the immediately previous one than that generation provided to the
one before it.

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wisesage5001
Totally agree. Correlation does not imply causation.

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ludwig
Frankly, I expected more citations in her "References" section.

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ax0n
It's taken centuries for academics to figure out what bloggers discovered in
about five years?

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waterlesscloud
I thought "Oh, so it's like Twitter."

