2023/04/12 by Honglin Bao, Misha Teplitskiy, Bao, Honglin +1
Decision Sciences · Economics, Econometrics and Finance · #Adaptation and Self-Organizing Systems (nlin.AO) #Complex Systems and Time Series Analysis #Computers and Society (cs.CY) #Digital Libraries (cs.DL) #FOS: Computer and information sciences #FOS: Physical sciences #Multiagent Systems (cs.MA) #scientometrics and bibliometrics research
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2304.06190
openalex publication_date 2023/04/12 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
The scientific community discourages authors of research papers from citing papers that did not influence them. Such "rhetorical" citations are assumed to degrade the literature and incentives for good work. While a world where authors cite only substantively appears attractive, we argue that mandating substantive citing may have underappreciated consequences on the allocation of attention and dynamism in scientific literatures. We develop a novel agent-based model in which agents cite substantively and rhetorically. Agents first select papers to read based on their expected quality, read them and observe their actual quality, become influenced by those that are sufficiently good, and substantively cite them. Next, agents fill any remaining slots in the reference lists by (rhetorically) citing papers that support their narrative, regardless of whether they were actually influential. By turning rhetorical citing on-and-off, we find that rhetorical citing increases the correlation between quality and citations, increases citation churn, and reduces citation inequality. This occurs because rhetorical citing redistributes some citations from a stable set of elite-quality papers to a more dynamic set with high-to-moderate quality and high rhetorical value. Increasing the size of reference lists, often seen as an undesirable trend, amplifies the effects. In sum, rhetorical citing helps deconcentrate attention and makes it easier to displace incumbent ideas, so whether it is indeed undesirable depends on the metrics used to judge desirability.