Scientists choose citations for "discriminatory" reasons

Researchers in Spain recently pub­lished an exam­i­na­tion of sci­en­tific cita­tion prac­tices, and dis­cov­ered the obvi­ous: sci­en­tists don’t use cita­tions purely for altru­is­tic reasons.

Citations in sci­ence are impor­tant as a mech­a­nism to fol­low the evo­lu­tion of sci­ence and because they are employed as an indi­ca­tor as to the impor­tance of sci­en­tists and insti­tu­tions: the higher the num­ber of cita­tions of an arti­cle, the greater is its recog­ni­tion. This mea­sure of suc­cess implies increased sources of fund­ing, recog­ni­tion, salaries, etc.

According to Camacho Miñano and Núñez Nickel, the prob­lem arises when the authors, instead of altru­is­ti­cally choos­ing orig­i­nal sources which facil­i­tate the ideas on which their rea­son­ing is con­structed, cite because of spu­ri­ous inter­ests, attempt­ing to increase the pos­si­bil­ity of suc­cess­fully pub­lish­ing in the sci­en­tific journals.

via Discrimination in the cita­tions that sci­en­tists use.

My imme­di­ate reac­tion is, well, not shock: of course sci­en­tists use “spu­ri­ous” cri­te­ria when choos­ing what and who to cite! Would any­one who has pre­pared a sci­en­tific paper for sub­mis­sion to a peer-​​reviewed jour­nal actu­ally disagree? Scientific arti­cles need to get pub­lished, after all, and sci­en­tific ideas need to be sup­ported against dis­pute and dis­agree­ment. This is true even if the sci­ence is “good” and “true.”

Still, it’s nice to see research that rec­og­nizes this, as too often peo­ple view sci­ence as so objec­tively true as to be free of social influ­ences, pol­i­tics, etc. But real­iz­ing that this is not true does not make sci­en­tific dis­cov­er­ies or inno­va­tions any less true, just adds back in some human com­plex­ity and social context.

For more on this con­cept, try writ­ers like Bruno Latour and works like Science in Action. Not uncon­tro­ver­sial in its whole, but it does do an excel­lent job open­ing up dis­cus­sion on the “non-​​scientific” aspects of sci­en­tific arti­cles. (No one in the law should be sur­prised by any of this, but attor­neys some­times seem to for­get regardless.)

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