Citation proximus: the role of social and semantic ties in citing behaviour

TL;DR

This study reveals that social and semantic proximity significantly influence citation behavior in economics, emphasizing the importance of collaboration networks and thematic similarity over prestige in most cases.

Contribution

It provides empirical evidence that social and semantic ties are primary drivers of citations, challenging the exclusive focus on prestige and the Matthew Effect.

Findings

Close collaboration ties strongly predict citations

Thematic similarity is a key factor in citation likelihood

Prestige influences only highly cited papers

Abstract

Citations are a key indicator of research impact but are shaped by factors beyond intrinsic research quality, including prestige, social networks, and thematic similarity. While the Matthew Effect explains how prestige accumulates and influences citation distributions, our study contextualizes this by showing that other mechanisms also play a crucial role. Analyzing a large dataset of disambiguated authors (N=43,467) and citation linkages (N=264,436) in U.S. economics, we find that close ties in the collaboration network are the strongest predictor of citation, closely followed by thematic similarity between papers. This reinforces the idea that citations are not only a matter of prestige but mostly of social networks and intellectual proximity. Prestige remains important for understanding highly cited papers, but for the majority of citations, proximity--both social and semantic--plays a more significant role. These findings shift attention from extreme cases of highly cited research toward the broader distribution of citations, which shapes career trajectories and the production of knowledge. Recognizing the diverse factors influencing citations is critical for science policy, as this work highlights inequalities that are not based on preferential attachment, but on the role of self-citations, collaborations, and mainstream versus no mainstream research subjects.