Purpose

Citation analysis as a method for studying scientific communication is frequently criticized for being based on biased citation practices. Questionable motives for the reference selection have been suggested including the claim that authors tend to cite hot papers in order to show-off. In this study, the authors investigate the claim that authors tend to cite the recent literature in order to show-off.

Design/methodology/approach

Following Moed and Garfield (2004), the authors investigate the claim by analyzing the proportion of recent references as a function of the length of the reference lists of citing papers. The authors analyze reference lists of citing papers in the fields of biomedical engineering, economics, medicine, psychology and library and information science between 2010 and 2019. From each of these fields, a number of journals are included in the analysis to represent the field. In total, 42 journals are included in the analyses comprising a selection of almost 65,000 journal articles. The proportion of recent references is calculated using two citation windows. The proportion of recent references as a function of the length of the reference lists is calculated through simple linear regressions to predict the share of recent references based on the number of references.

Findings

The results of the linear regressions indicate that in most cases, there are a statistically significant relationship between the share of recent references and the number of references. This study’s results show that when authors display selective referencing behavior, references to the recent literature tend to be only marginally increased, and some results even display the opposite tendency (marginally overciting the older literature).

Originality/value

This study of the claim that authors tend to cite the recent literature in order to show-off does not confirm the hypothesis.

中文翻译：

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演戏热与否？测试对炫耀假设的引用

目的

引用分析作为一种研究科学传播的方法，经常被批评为基于偏见的引用实践。已经提出了参考文献选择的可疑动机，包括声称作者倾向于引用热门论文以炫耀的说法。在这项研究中，作者调查了声称作者倾向于炫耀最近文献的说法。

设计/方法/方法

继Moed和Garfield（2004）之后，作者通过分析最近参考文献的比例作为引文参考文献列表长度的函数来调查这一主张。作者分析了2010年至2019年间生物医学工程，经济学，医学，心理学以及图书馆和信息科学领域的引文的参考文献清单。从这些领域的每一个领域，分析中都包括许多期刊来代表该领域。分析总共包括42种期刊，其中包括近65,000种期刊文章。使用两个引用窗口计算最近参考文献的比例。

发现

线性回归的结果表明，在大多数情况下，最新参考文献的比例与参考文献数量之间存在统计学上的显着关系。这项研究的结果表明，当作者表现出选择性的参照行为时，对最近文献的参考往往仅略有增加，而某些结果甚至表现出相反的趋势（略高于旧文献）。

创意/价值

这项关于作者倾向于炫耀最近文献以进行炫耀的说法的研究并未证实这一假设。