What do citations counts measure?
Presenter
Assistant Professor
School of Information
University of Michigan
Time and location
North Quad 4330, Wednesday (1:00-2:00) pm
Abstract
Citations counts increasingly dictate money and attention in science and are widely assumed to measure intellectual impact. We use a large-scale, global survey of authors of scientific papers to test this assumption. Responses from nearly 10K authors from all areas of science show that most citations are rhetorical in nature, and many are only skimmed. Contrary to expectations, citations to more famous papers are more meaningful, in part because authors “invest” more into reading them, whereas citations to obscure papers are more rhetorical. An experiment embedded in the survey shows that low citation counts cause scientists to perceive those papers as being of lower quality. Taken together, the results show that citation counts underestimate the intellectual impact of famous papers, but overestimate their quality.