Citation bias in published papers

[Astronuc]

It was not what I thought it would be, but I do observe such bias in papers/journals I read, and it is only part of the problem.

Researchers find citation bias in published papers and evidence that the problem is getting worse
https://phys.org/news/2022-06-citation-bias-published-papers-evidence.html

When I first saw the article, but had not yet read it, the first thing that came to mind is authors who cite their own papers/works, and I've worked with older colleagues who did that persistently.

With regard to the Phys.org article, I've noticed papers from authors in various nations citing articles of the national peers, although not exclusively.

When I wrote reports, for clients in US, Europe and Asia, I often had a good balance of papers from US (and the Americas), Europe and Asia, if relevant work was available.

Another issue I have with some scientific literature is the same paper, or similar papers, describing the same work, in multiple journals, and sometimes the names of the same authors are rearranged. I've reviewed papers and rejected some that I have found redundant with previous publications, for that reason, and in some cases, where the paper is flawed, and the original should not have been published.

 

[Office_Shredder]

The description is pretty terrible. People are going to cite work they are more familiar with, which is going to be from other people in the same research community. People are doing to cite work they know is high quality, which is going to be highly concentrated in the best research departments. Nobody has time to read all 20 million papers they parsed, or even all hundred thousand papers in their individual field. The claim that this is impeding scientific research is far from obvious, if step 1 to being a scientist is to make sure you familiarize yourself with every bit of research anyone has ever done, no one will ever get any new work done.

There is definitely an incredible amount of racial and gender bias in science, but this seems like it has missed the mark a bit in my opinion. There are real reasons for people to rationally behave like this.

 

[Vanadium 50]

People are going to cite work they are more familiar with

And even if you don't buy that - and I do - you certainly have to believe that people won't cite papers they are not aware of.

This is, at least in part, a feature, not a bug. The government of China strongly encourages their scientists to publish in Chinese and Chinese language journals. They want Chinese to be the language of science going forward, as English is today, and German, French and Latin were in the past. Since many Western scientists can't read Chinese, the distributions evolve in the way you see.

To my mind, the bigger issue with citations is people citing papers they haven't read. I know they do, because typos in the citation end up propagated from paper to paper.

 

[Bystander]

To my mind, the bigger issue with citations is people citing papers they haven't read. I know they do, because typos in the citation end up propagated from paper to paper.