Source-linked AI summary
The impact factor's Matthew effect: a natural experiment in bibliometrics
Vincent Lariviere, Yves Gingras
TL;DR
Research on cumulative advantage often struggles to separate paper quality from journal effects in citation counts. Using identical duplicate papers published in journals with different impact factors, the paper finds that journal placement strongly affects citations, with high-impact journals receiving about twice as many citations. It concludes that journal-level Matthew effects add value beyond intrinsic paper quality.
Problem
Existing citation and journal-impact measures are correlated, making intrinsic paper quality difficult to distinguish from the effect of publication venue.
Method
The study uses identical duplicate papers published in different journals as a natural experiment to isolate the impact factor’s role in citation rates.
Results
11.9 versus 6.33 average citations: identical papers in higher-impact journals were cited about twice as often as duplicates in lower-impact journals.
Takeaways & Limitations
Journal placement influences papers’ reception independently of intrinsic value, indicating a journal-specific Matthew effect in citations.
Takeaways & Limitations
Prior measures may contain quality bias because citation differences can reflect genuinely better research rather than recognition effects.
Abstract
from arXiv · showhide
Since the publication of Robert K. Merton's theory of cumulative advantage in science (Matthew Effect), several empirical studies have tried to measure its presence at the level of papers, individual researchers, institutions or countries. However, these studies seldom control for the intrinsic "quality" of papers or of researchers--"better" (however defined) papers or researchers could receive higher citation rates because they are indeed of better quality. Using an original method for controlling the intrinsic value of papers--identical duplicate papers published in different journals with different impact factors--this paper shows that the journal in which papers are published have a strong influence on their citation rates, as duplicate papers published in high impact journals obtain, on average, twice as much citations as their identical counterparts published in journals with lower impact factors. The intrinsic value of a paper is thus not the only reason a given paper gets cited or not; there is a specific Matthew effect attached to journals and this gives to paper published there an added value over and above their intrinsic quality.