Disentangling Visibility and Self-Promotion Bias in the arXiv:astro-ph Positional Citation Effect

TL;DR

This study disentangles the effects of self-promotion and visibility bias on citation counts for arXiv:astro-ph papers, showing that both factors contribute to the positional citation effect.

Contribution

It introduces a method to separate self-promotion from visibility bias, providing clearer understanding of citation dynamics based on article positioning.

Findings

Both self-promotion and visibility bias influence citation counts.

Self-promoted papers tend to be more citable independently of position.

Visibility bias significantly affects citation counts for top-ranked papers.

Abstract

We established in an earlier study that articles listed at or near the top of the daily arXiv:astro-ph mailings receive on average significantly more citations than articles further down the list. In our earlier work we were not able to decide whether this positional citation effect was due to author self-promotion of intrinsically more citable papers or whether papers are cited more often simply because they are at the top of the astro-ph listing. Using new data we can now disentangle both effects. Based on their submission times we separate articles into a self-promoted sample and a sample of articles that achieved a high rank on astro-ph by chance and compare their citation distributions with those of articles on lower astro-ph positions. We find that the positional citation effect is a superposition of self-promotion and visibility bias.