alt Hacker NewsI think citations are an insufficient metric to judge these things on. My experience in writing a paper is that I have formed a well defined model of the world, such that when I write the introduction, I have a series of clear concepts that I use to ground the work. When it comes to the citations to back these ideas, I often associate a person rather than a particular paper, then search for an appropriate paper by that person to cite. That suggests that other means for creating that association - talks, posters, even just conversations- may have significant influence. That in turn suggests a variety of personality/community influences that might drive “scientific progress” as measured by citation.
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Citations are ripe for abuse . I have seen it especially in computer science , where authors will cite and coauthor each other's mediocre papers. The result is very high citation and publication counts, because the work has been divided among many people.
I agree completely.
My own experience in watching citation patterns, not even with things that I've worked on, is that certain authors or groups attract attention for an idea or result for all kinds of weird reasons, and that drives citation patterns, even when they're not the originator of the results or ideas. This leads to weird patterns, like the same results before a certain "popular" paper being ignored even when the "popular" paper is incredibly incremental or even a replication of previous work; sometimes previous authors discussing the same exact idea, even well-known ones, are forgotten in lieu of a newer more charismatic author; various studies have shown that retracted zombie papers continue to be cited at high rates as if they were never retracted; and so forth and so on.
I've kind of given up trying to figure out what accounts for this. Most of the time it's just a kind of recency availability bias, where people are basically lazy in their citations, or rushed for time, or whatever. Sometimes it's a combination of an older literature simply being forgotten, together with a more recent author with a lot of notoriety for whatever reason discussing the idea. Lots of times there's this weird cult-like buzz around a person, more about their personality or presentation than anything else — as in, a certain person gets a reputation as being a genius, and then people kind of assume whatever they say or show hasn't been said or shown before, leading to a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy in terms of patterns of citations. I don't even think it matters that what they say is valid, it just has to garner a lot of attention and agreement.
In any event, in my field I don't attribute a lot to researchers being famous for any reason other than being famous. The Matthew effect is real, and can happen very rapidly, for all sorts of reasons. People also have a short attention span, and little memory for history.
This is all especially true of more recent literature. Citation patterns pre-1995 or so, as is the case with those Wikipedia citations, are probably not representative of the current state.