‘Twenty years into a career, the citation advantage associated with an early collaboration with a highly central scholar is roughly twice that associated with an early top-notch publication,’ says Professor Stefan Stremersch of Erasmus School of Economics. His new research, together with his Rotterdam colleague Nuno Camacho and Radek Karpienko (WU Vienna University of Economics and Business), examines how scholars build scholarly authority and how it impacts the field they work in.
The study, titled “The Social Path to Prominence: Untangling the Role of Social and Universalist Authority in the Diffusion of Scientific Recognition”, distinguishes between two routes to scholarly recognition: universalist authority, built through publishing in top-tier journals, and social authority, built through collaboration and positioning within a scholar's professional network. The researchers set out to determine which of these two pathways more strongly predicts future citations, and how the two interact over the course of an academic career.
They find an inconvenient truth. While building social authority has strong positive effects for the individual scholar, it can have disastrous ghetto-like effects for research fields. Consistent with Stremersch’ earlier work, he argues: ‘this study shows again that citations are at best a frivolous and at worst an inappropriate and perverse metric to incentivise scientists on.’
Social authority influences scholar citation counts more strongly than universal authority
The results indicate that citations are more strongly associated with building social authority than with publishing in top-tier journals. Early-career collaboration with a highly central, well-connected scholar is linked to a larger long-term citation advantage than an early publication in a leading journal.
Social authority does not only stand on its own, however: the researchers also find that it has a positive effect on scholars' future universalist authority, meaning that being well-connected can indirectly support later access to top-tier outlets as well.
‘Citations are a poor metric’
In sum, these findings show that if one wants to evaluate a scholar’s standing, citations are, what Stremersch calls, ‘an inappropriate, if not perverse metric. ‘I have documented earlier in IJRM (International Journal of Research in Marketing) that in more than 2/3 of all cases one can hardly explain why a citing paper actually cited a cited paper. This present paper as well as an earlier one I published in Journal of Marketing showed Matthew effects in citation patterns; people get cited because they got cited before and are socially connected not because the paper is actually of high quality. Therefore, one of my papers in Journal of Marketing warned against universities to use overall scholar citations as an evaluation metric. It can be easily gamed and it sends perverse incentives to faculty. The easiest way get a high overall citation score as a scholar unfortunately is to lower quality and increase quantity!’
The downside: 'ghetto effects'
The paper also identifies a problematic consequence of this dynamic. Building social authority is associated with what the researchers term 'ghetto effects', a decline in a field's collective scientific impact. This risk is particularly pronounced when scholars maintain few collaborations with peers from other research fields, concentrating their networks and citations within a narrow, self-referential circle where “you cite me, I cite you”- dynamics are at play.
Stremersch summarises the underlying concern: 'Science starts to look like a bar: we talk to the people we know, cite the people we know, collaborate with the people we know, and increasingly hear ourselves.' He notes that being socially well-connected is much more strongly associated with citations than publishing in top journals, adding: 'When entire research fields become dominated by such social authority, particularly when scholars connect mainly with others in their own field, the collective impact of the field declines.'
The study further shows that scholars decrease their authority-building efforts once they become well-cited, suggesting that the drive to expand one's network or publication record diminishes after a certain level of recognition has been reached.
Author-level data across six decades
The researchers analysed data on 134,558 marketing scholars over a period of sixty years, tracing their publication records, citation patterns, and collaborative networks over time. This makes the study, according to the authors, the first to focus on author-level dynamics of scientific authority, rather than examining authority solely at the level of individual articles.
Implications for academic careers
For individual academics, the findings offer a practical, if uncomfortable, lesson: social authority can be used to one's advantage, as it is a primary channel through which citations accumulate. The study further shows that social authority acts as a catalyst for other markers of academic success, including the ability to publish in top-tier journals.
‘But, such engineering of citations does not mean we publish higher quality work,’ Stremersch says. He explains that when scientists employ this route to scholarly authority, it is often at the expense of the quality and impact of the field they work in. ‘As in a bar, as the night progresses, everyone starts speaking louder, but what is said is becoming less and less meaningful.’
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For questions, please contact Ronald de Groot, Media & Public Relations Officer at Erasmus School of Economics: rdegroot@ese.eur.nl, +316 53 641 846.
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