The Economics of Citation

Jeong-Yoo Kim, Insik Min and Christian Zimmermann ()

No 2007-31, Working papers from University of Connecticut, Department of Economics

Abstract: In this paper, we study the citation decision of a scientific author. By citing a related work, authors can make their arguments more persuasive. We call this the correlation effect. But if authors cite other work, they may give the impression that they think the cited work is more competent than theirs. We call this the reputation effect. These two effects may be the main sources of citation bias. We empirically show that there is a citation bias in Economics by using data from RePEc. We also report how the citation bias differs across regions (U.S., Europe and Asia).

Keywords: citation bias; correlation effect; reputation effect; signal; strategy; RePEc (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D81 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hpe, nep-ict, nep-ipr and nep-sog
Date: 2007-08
Note: This research was begun when the first author was visiting ISER, Osaka University in the winter of 2005. We are grateful to seminar audiences at the University of Connecticut and participants in the applied microeconomics workshop held at Korea Foundation of Advanced Studies for helpful comments.
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