Citation as a Representation Process

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new cognitive psychology-based model for understanding the citation process, addressing limitations of social interaction models through empirical analysis of citation data.

Contribution

It presents a novel framework for modeling citation rates inspired by cognitive psychology, offering an alternative to social interaction-based models.

Findings

Cognitive psychology provides valuable insights into citation behavior.

The new model better explains citation patterns than previous approaches.

Empirical analysis supports the validity of the proposed framework.

Abstract

The presented work proposes a novel approach to model the citation rate. The paper begins with a brief introduction into informetrics studies and highlights drawbacks of the contemporary approaches to modeling the citation process as a product of social interactions. An alternative modeling framework based on results obtained in cognitive psychology is then introduced and applied in an experiment to investigate properties of the citation process, as they are revealed by a large collection of citation statistics. Major research findings are discussed, and a summary is given.