ArticleRoyal Society open science2024
A memory-theoretic account of citation propagation.
Article in Royal Society open science, 2024. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 1 paper.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
1 citing paper in PubMed.
- Does your surname undermine your research impact?Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2025Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Despite the common assumption that citations are indicative of an article's scientific merit, increasing evidence indicates that citation counts are largely driven by variables unrelated to quality. In this article, we treat people's decisions of what to cite as an instance of memory retrieval and show that observed citation patterns are well accounted for by a model of memory. The proposed exposure model anticipates that small alterations in factors that affect people's ability to retrieve to-be-cited articles from memory early in their life cycle are magnified over time and can lead to the emergence of highly cited papers. This effect occurs even when there is no variation in the starting point exposure probabilities (i.e. when assuming a level playing field where all articles are treated equally and of equal 'quality'), and is exacerbated by natural variation in retrievability of articles due to encoding. We discuss the implications of the model within the context of research evaluation and hiring, tenure and promotion decisions.
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What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.