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citation-itis

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1. Here’s his previous analysis of article length in sociology and economics: http://orgtheory.wordpress.com/2009/09/23/what-is-the-average-length-of-ajs-articles/

   And, I don’t know that the growth in the number of references is necessarily a problem — just illustrates that the body of knowledge in sociology is growing. [winking smiley face]

   teppo

   September 30, 2010 at 1:45 am
2. I think a lot of it is protection money. Economists are comfortable citing one or two key articles, and that’s it. In soc, we insist on being comprehensive. Unclear to me what the right answer is.

   fabiorojas

   September 30, 2010 at 2:51 pm
3. I wonder if this reflects the proliferation of the field into specialty areas and the higher level of productivity of scholars within those areas. Because of those two things, there is now just more stuff to cite. Writing an article for AJS potentially exposes you to wildly different reviewers and so you end up adding citations to cover yourself in case you get reviewed by someone from specialty area X, Y, and Z.

   If there were more consensus in the field, as there is in economics (and I don’t think that’s necessarily a desirable thing), we’d probably have a lower citation count. The trend also suggests that sociology perhaps used to have more consensus about what is important (i.e., fewer areas of topical and theoretical significance).

   brayden king

   September 30, 2010 at 3:06 pm
4. this has probably been said before, but part of reason is that sociologists will cite anyone, from any field, while economists will choose to simply ignore what any other discipline has to say about things. For example, I read a few econ papers on the structure of authority inside firms, and the only sociological/social-psych citations are weber (1968) & simon (1950), other work in soc & social psych is simply ignored. I suppose if one were to tabulate only within-discipline citations, the divergence in counts wouldn’t be so great. Not that I think citation-itis is something to worry about, however.

   sd

   September 30, 2010 at 3:59 pm
5. Well now that settles the question of who better appreciates the importance of social networks, now doesn’t it?

   Michael F. Martin

   September 30, 2010 at 5:07 pm
6. Looks to me that the most likely culprit is simply article length. Not a problem, IMO.

   Philip Cohen

   September 30, 2010 at 5:53 pm
7. Here is a my experience as a grad student in a well known econ program. One of my dissertation chapters is on entrepreneurship. There are tons of articles on this topic published in sociology journals (and also business school journals). I initially cited numerous sociology articles and other articles by non-economists. But two members of my committee were not enthusiastic about this (in fact they actively encouraged me to remove these citations) – their reason being that they have no idea how to evaluate these articles given both their limited knowledge of the topic and their lack of knowledge about journal rankings in sociology. Where as for an economics article, they don’t need to know much about the subject but can get a sense of an article’s quality based on whether it’s in QJE or AER versus Journal of Applied Economics.

   econ grad student

   September 30, 2010 at 7:41 pm
8. translation of econ grad student’s committee: “we don’t acknowledge work in other fields because we’re intellectually lazy, and because we haven’t yet figured out how to use web of science.”

   The irony, in my view, is that the average economist is much better equipped (through his/her econometric training) to be able to judge the quality of a sociology article than vice versa. Then again, maybe this explains why sociologists cite economists: in the absence of the ability to distinguish wheat from chaff, they cite both.

   krippendorf

   September 30, 2010 at 9:49 pm
9. Citation-itis? I just checked, in one piece (my most egregious case) I cite 140 articles/books. I prefer to think about it as thoroughness and knowledge of the literature, path-breaking innovation across disciplines…

   teppo

   October 1, 2010 at 6:11 am
10. [...] Citation-itis. [...]

    Round-up: MFA, RIP, Albini, BAE. « We Who Are About To Die

    October 2, 2010 at 1:06 pm
11. [...] orgtheory, an interesting graph showing the evolution of the average number of references in the American [...]

    Citation inflation? « PoliSciZurich

    October 13, 2010 at 1:09 pm

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