Friday, January 13, 2012
Be Known by the Company You Keep: Citations - Quality or Chance?
I previously blogged about how highly downloaded working papers lead to higher downloads of other papers in the same series. So I was interested to read that having your paper appear in the same issue of a journal as a highly cited article increases your number of citations. The implication is that weak papers can benefit from being in journals with high impact factors. Another interesting point in this paper is that self-citations help increase citations to a paper. I've suspected that this is true. Advertising your paper by citing it gets more people to be aware of it. But we can't really establish causality here. Maybe better authors just tend to cite themselves more and/or get more opportunities to do so.
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David, your first point makes sense to me. When I access a paper, I often browse the other articles published in the same issue of the same journal, just because I've already made the effort of loggin in. Once I see other articles that may be interesting (judging by title and maybe abstract) I'll download it and probably skim read it. That makes it much more likely that I'll find a way to work it into something I'm writing.
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