A Small World of Citations? The Influence of Collaboration Networks on Citation Practices

Matthew L Wallace, Vincent Larivière and Yves Gingras

PLOS ONE, 2012, vol. 7, issue 3, 1-10

Abstract: This paper examines the proximity of authors to those they cite using degrees of separation in a co-author network, essentially using collaboration networks to expand on the notion of self-citations. While the proportion of direct self-citations (including co-authors of both citing and cited papers) is relatively constant in time and across specialties in the natural sciences (10% of references) and the social sciences (20%), the same cannot be said for citations to authors who are members of the co-author network. Differences between fields and trends over time lie not only in the degree of co-authorship which defines the large-scale topology of the collaboration network, but also in the referencing practices within a given discipline, computed by defining a propensity to cite at a given distance within the collaboration network. Overall, there is little tendency to cite those nearby in the collaboration network, excluding direct self-citations. These results are interpreted in terms of small-scale structure, field-specific citation practices, and the value of local co-author networks for the production of knowledge and for the accumulation of symbolic capital. Given the various levels of integration between co-authors, our findings shed light on the question of the availability of ‘arm's length’ expert reviewers of grant applications and manuscripts.

Date: 2012
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0033339 (text/html)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?id= ... 33339&type=printable (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:plo:pone00:0033339

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0033339

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in PLOS ONE from Public Library of Science
Bibliographic data for series maintained by plosone (plosone@plos.org).