Li, W;
Aste, T;
Caccioli, F;
Livan, G;
(2019)
Reciprocity and impact in academic careers.
EPJ Data Science
, 8
, Article 20. 10.1140/epjds/s13688-019-0199-3.
Preview |
Text
s13688-019-0199-3.pdf - Published Version Download (1MB) | Preview |
Abstract
The growing importance of citation-based bibliometric indicators in shaping the prospects of academic careers incentivizes scientists to boost the numbers of citations they receive. Whereas the exploitation of self-citations has been extensively documented, the impact of reciprocated citations has not yet been studied. We study reciprocity in a citation network of authors, and compare it with the average reciprocity computed in an ensemble of null network models. We show that obtaining citations through reciprocity correlates negatively with an impactful career in the long term. Nevertheless, at the aggregate level we show evidence of a steady increase in reciprocity over the years, largely fuelled by the citations reciprocated between coauthors. Our results characterize the structure of author networks in a time of increasing emphasis on citation-based indicators, and we discuss their implications towards a fairer assessment of academic impact.
| Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Title: | Reciprocity and impact in academic careers |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| DOI: | 10.1140/epjds/s13688-019-0199-3 |
| Publisher version: | https://doi.org/10.1140/epjds/s13688-019-0199-3 |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | Copyright © The Author(s) 2019. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. |
| Keywords: | Reciprocity, Academic career, Network science, Statistical validation |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of Engineering Science UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of Engineering Science > Dept of Computer Science |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10075799 |
Archive Staff Only
 |
View Item |
