Citation counts are increasingly used to create rankings of scholars or institutions: while social scientists are often skeptical of the resulting indexes, economists have mostly been supporters of this approach. Yet, citation metrics have raised two debates in the literature: empirical, regarding their technical use, and theoretical, regarding their meaning and, more generally, the meaning of “scientific quality.” I review this literature highlighting the consequences for the use of citations for research assessment. As an application, I further study the network of citations of publications indexed in Web of Science, authored by all Italian academic economists between 2011 and 2015. I find that the probability of a citation between any two authors depends on similarity in their methods and topics but also, significantly, on various measures of social community and even of ideological proximity. The influence of social relations does not cancel out in the aggregate, as total citations to an individual depend on their network centrality. In the case of economics, citations cannot be interpreted as unbiased proxies of scientific quality.

中文翻译：

---

“多被引”：引文衡量的不仅仅是科学质量

引用计数越来越多地用于创建学者或机构的排名：虽然社会科学家经常对由此产生的指数持怀疑态度，但经济学家大多是这种方法的支持者。然而，引文指标在文献中引发了两场争论：关于它们的技术用途的实证和关于它们的含义的理论，以及更普遍的“科学质量”的含义。我回顾了这篇文献，强调了使用引文进行研究评估的后果。作为应用程序，我进一步研究了 Web of Science 索引的出版物引用网络，该网络由 2011 年至 2015 年所有意大利学术经济学家撰写。我发现任何两位作者之间被引用的概率取决于他们的方法和主题的相似性但同样重要的是，关于社会共同体甚至意识形态接近度的各种措施。社会关系的影响在总体上不会抵消，因为对个人的总引用取决于他们的网络中心性。在经济学的情况下，引用不能被解释为科学质量的无偏见代理。