Does Citation Reflect Social Structure? Longitudinal Evidence from the 'Globenet' Interdisciplinary Research Group

Howard D. White, Barry Wellman and Nancy Nazer
Forthcoming 2004.

Abstract


Many authors have posited a social component in citation, the consensus being that the citers and citees often have interpersonal as well as intellectual ties. Evidence for this belief has been rather meager, however, in part because social networks researchers have lacked bibliometric data (e.g., pairwise citation counts from online databases) and citation analysts have lacked sociometric data (e.g., pairwise measures of acquaintanceship). In 1997 Nazer extensively measured personal relationships and communication behaviors in what we here call Globenet, an international group of 16 researchers from seven disciplines that was established in 1993 to study human development. Since Globenet's membership is known, it was possible during 2002 to obtain citation records for all members in databases of the Institute for Scientific Information. This permitted examination of how members cite each other in journal articles over the past three decades and in a 1999 book to which they all contributed. It was also possible to explore links between the intercitation data and the social and communication data. Using network-analytic techniques, we look at the growth of intercitation over time, the extent to which it follows disciplinary or interdisciplinary lines, whether it covaries with degrees of acquaintanceship, whether it reflects Globenet's organizational structure, whether it is associated with particular in-group communication patterns, and whether it is related to the cocitation of Globenet members. Results show cocitation to be a powerful predictor of intercitation in the journal articles, while being an editor or coauthor is an important predictor in the book. Intellectual ties based on shared content did better as predictors than content-neutral social ties like friendship. However, scholars who cited each other (interciters) communicated more than did non-interciters.