Referencing as Persuasion Author(s): G. Nigel Gilbert Reviewed work(s): Source: Social Studies of Science, Vol. 7, No. 1 (Feb.

, 1977), pp. 113-122 Published by: Sage Publications, Ltd. Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/284636 . Accessed: 30/10/2011 16:54
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grateful for their invaluable help. 14. P. Earle and B. Vickery, 'Subject Relations in Science/Technology Literature', Aslib Proceedings, Vol. 21 (1969), 237-43. 15. The classification was performed by I. Schwidetzky, to whom I am extremely grateful. The inter-scorer reliability figure for this content analysis scoring system of citations is 92%. 16. The help of Helmut Schlittmeyer in the data collection and analysis is gratefully acknowledged. 17. In this citation analysis only different citing author-citing journal pairs across all four cited volumes have been included. Thus, citing author X, citing 10 different Science Studies articles of different years in journal Y, counts only 1 'journal citation'. This is done in order to get an idea about the disciplinary composition of the Science Studies audience relatively independent of the frequency with which particular authors cite Science Studies; if one author cites Science Studies 10 times in an anthropological journal, for instance, this does not seem to me to imply a stronger anthropological fraction in the Science Studies audience than if he cites Science Studies only once. 18. For more technical detail and information see I. Spiegel-Rosing, 'Aspekte wissenschaftlicher Selbstlegitimation', Homo, Vol. 27 (1976), in press. 19. J.B. Lodahl and G. Gordon, 'The Structure of Scientific Fields and the Functioning of University Graduate Departments', American Sociological Review, Vol. 37 (1972), 57-72. 20. This difference is highly significant: chi2 = 60.43, df = 14, p = 0.00000.

Notes and Letters, Social Studies of Science, Vol. 7 (1977), 113-22

Referencing as Persuasion
G. Nigel Gilbert

The analysis of citations has become common as a technique in the sociology of science. This journal, for example, has recently published a number of articles which rely on citations for a source of data.1 Almost without exception, however, Author's address: Department of Sociology, University of Surrey, Guildford GU2 5XH, Surrey, UK.

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studies concerned with one of the several varieties of citation analysis have been of an empirical nature. Accordingly, despite the occasional cautionary note on the inadvisability of employing citation data without a sound theoretical underpinning, little progress has been made in constructing what Mulkay has termed 'a theory of citing'. 2 This Note is concered to articulate a theory of citing behaviour, which might both illuminate the currently available empirical findings on the characteristics of references in scientific papers, and perhaps indicate interesting but previously unexamined aspects of citation. Current studies can be divided into three groups according to the different ways they have employed citation data. Some studies have used the number of citations received by a paper as an indication of its scientific quality, significance or 'worth'.3 Likewise, the number of citations obtained by an author has been used to measure the impact of his or her work on the scientific community.4 In other studies, citation patterns have been employed to derive maps of the structure of scientific specialties and disciplines.5 The third approach can be seen in two recent attempts to construct typologies of different varieties of reference and citations by content analysis.6 The various studies have made some interesting contributions to our understanding of science and scientific activity. Nevertheless, their achievements have been obtained without the aid of an explicit and accepted theory concerning the reasons why scientists normally cite other papers, and why authors choose to cite particular papers rather than others. Accordingly, we do not yet have any clear idea about what exactly we are measuring when we analyze citation data.

REFERENCES AS 'PROPERTY' It is true that some very tentative proposals concerning the functions of references can be teased from the available literature. Thus Kaplan in his pioneering paper on citations suggests that the citation practices of scientists today are in large part a social device for coping with problems of property rights and priority claims . . . the citation is probably among the more important institutional devices for coping with the maintenance of the imperative to communicate one's findings freely as a contribution to the common property of science while protecting 'individual rights' with respect to recognition and claims to priority.7 Similarly, Ravetz notes that the giving of references is a way of dividing the property in the published report and providing an 'income' to the owner of the property which is used, by showing chat his work was fruitful; but Ravetz also proposes another function: the citation of the source of materials used in an argument implicitly places that source in the argument itself. There is no need to argue again for the

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adequacy of the materials; that is assumed to be accomplished in the original report.8 Ravetz's first idea (that references constitute a method of protecting 'individual property rights') does not, however, account satisfactorily for the presence of those references that seem to be 'negational' in character (that is, those references to papers which the author wishes to challenge or contradict); nor does it explain why 'perfunctory' references which cite, almost as an aside, work which is not apparently strictly relevant to the author's immediate concerns, are often found in scientific papers. But there is another, perhaps more important reason for rejecting this approach to the explanation of citation practices. It would be valuable to apply metaphorical descriptions such as 'property rights' and 'income' to explain the functions of references if such metaphors emphasized illuminating and significant correspondences between the actions of scientific authors and of, on the one hand, property holders and, on the other, recipients of a money income. But it is not clear from either Kaplan's or Ravetz's work that such correspondences do, in fact, exist. Thus, minimally, property has a fixed physical composition, the total value of which is not greatly affected by its distribution; it has one or more legally recognized owners; and it is exploitable in order to yield a rent. The 'findings' reported in a research paper have none of these characteristics, and there is thus little to be gained by metaphorically describing them as 'property'. Similarly, to 'provide an income' implies at least that tokens of direct and immediate value are obtained by the recipient of the income. Again, this feature of incomes is not paralleled in the process of receiving citations. There is, for instance, not even an institutionalized method of bringing citations to the cited author's attention. Seeking out such citations (collecting one's income?) was an extremely laborious task before the recent invention of the Science Citation Index. Not only do these metaphors of property relations fail to match with the known characteristics of referencing behaviour in almost all respects, but this approach is also unable to differentiate between the various ways in which cited material may be used.9 It seems therefore that there would be considerable difficulties in formulating a theory of citation based on notions of property and income which will account satisfactorily for both the observable diversity of meaning between references and the selectivity apparent in authors' choices of references - and which, furthermore, will lead to new insights about citation behaviour.

REFERENCES AS PERSUASION In developing an alternative and perhaps more profitable approach in this Note, I shall consider scientific papers as 'tools of persuasion'. A scientist who has obtained results which he believes to be true and important has to persuade the scientific community (or, more precisely, certain parts of that community) to share his opinions of the value of his work. For it is only when some degree of consensus among his colleagues has been achieved that his research findings will become transformed into scientific knowledge. I have described elsewhere10 some of the rhetorical devices which are typically used in scientific papers in

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order to enhance the persuasiveness of an author's argument. Here I shall examine the contribution references make to the demonstration of the validity and significance of the work reported in scientific papers. A scientist is rewarded through recognition for producing results which are seen as new, important and true. But these qualities are not normally selfevident to the readers of a research paper (whom collectively I shall call the 'audience'). Accordingly, authors typically show how the results of their work represent an advance on previous research; they relate their particular findings to the current literature of their field; and they provide evidence and argument to persuade their audience that their work has not been vitiated by error, that appropriate and adequate techniques and theories have been employed, and that alternative, contradictory hypotheses have been examined and rejected. Some of this work of demonstration and persuasion is achieved by logical argument and inference detailed within the body of the paper. Nevertheless, much support for the results and the argument necessarily arises from work already performed and presented to the scientific community, and this, as Ravetz has noted, need only be cited. Nonetheless, such referencing of earlier research achieves more than the mere incorporation of the referenced work into the new paper; inasmuch as this work has already been accepted as 'valid science', it also provides a measure of persuasive support for the newly announced findings. It follows that it may be more effective to cite an authoritative paper, thus trading on its acknowledged adequacy, than to redescribe the research without reference to the original paper. One can therefore argue that the scientific 'norm', that one should cite the research on which one's work depends,11 may not be a product of a pervasive concern to acknowledge 'property rights', but rather may arise from scientists' interest in persuading their colleagues by using all the resources available to them, including those respected papers which can be cited to bolster their own arguments. Thus one purpose of giving references is to provide justifications for the positions adopted in a paper. Another purpose is to demonstrate the novelty of one's results. This is often achieved by reviewing the current state of knowledge in an Introduction, and then showing or implying that the findings reported constitute an advance. Yet another purpose is to indicate, usually in a Conclusion, how these findings illuminate or solve problems which arise from other, cited work, and thus to demonstrate the importance of the author's research. In these several ways, references can increase the persuasiveness of a scientific paper. However, not all the relevant articles which might be cited are equally valuable in providing such support. In order to justify an argument to an audience of potentially interested readers, it is most effective to cite a selection of those papers which the intended audience believe present well founded, valid results.12 The participants in a mature field will share a belief that some published work is important and correct, some other work is trivial, perhaps some is erroneous, and much is irrelevant to their current interests. Hence, authors preparing papers will tend to cite the 'important and correct' papers, may cite 'erroneous' papers in order to challenge them and will avoid citing the 'trivial', and 'irrelevant' ones. Indeed, respected papers may be cited in order to shine in their reflected glory even if they do not seem closely related to the substantive content of the report.

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It is important to note that an author, in choosing one collection of papers to cite, is not only providing support for his own paper, but is also implicitly displaying his allegiance to a particular section of the scientific community13; namely, that section which is collectively of the opinion that the cited papers deserve (affirmative or negational) citation. Moreover, in citing certain papers, the author can be seen to be making an assertion about his own opinion concerning the validity of the findings of the cited papers, and is thus contributing, albeit only in small measure, to the overall consensus of his research area, a consensus which is also continually being re-established through the choices of references in his fellow participants' own publications. Certain papers, through their repeated use as authoritative grounds for further work, begin to achieve an exceptional status, and may come to be regarded as 'exemplars'14 of valuable work in the field. In some cases, the approaches, techniques and results presented in these exemplary papers may become so widely known and accepted throughout the field that they no longer need be cited explicitly. Their contents become a part of that which every competent member of the field can be assumed to know. Their findings may be reported in textbooks and become an ingredient of undergraduate courses, but in the context of research, the actual papers may rarely, if ever, be cited, and the details of the argument (and sometimes even the author of the paper) may be forgotten.15 While these remarks concerning the effectiveness of referring to other papers may be true for most scientific work, some research papers - those whose prime purpose is to provide a 'blueprint' for the reader to build apparatus or instruments which are intended to perform certain stated functions - do not need to use references to help to demonstrate their validity. For this type of paper, the acknowledged test of validity is whether the blueprint, when followed, does indeed enable the apparatus, instrument, machine or whatever to be successfully constructed. Hence we might expect that applied science, technical and engineering articles, many of which are of this type, would have fewer references on average than papers drawn from the 'purer' sciences, and this indeed has been found to be the case.16 I remarked above that many references are selected because the author hopes that the referenced papers will be regarded as authoritative by the intended audience. But the identification of a set of authoritative references is not simple. An author cannot be sure who will read his article. Nor can he be certain about which papers are considered reliable and worthy of citation by those who do consult his article. He must make informed guesses about these matters and, to the extent that doubt about these guesses remains, the reception that his paper will receive must be unpredictable. On the reverse side of the coin, readers will often identify papers of interest by examining the works the paper cites. If readers have little respect for the cited articles, or the great majority of the cited works are unknown to them, these facts may bear on their reception of the paper. It is this feature of referencing which explains the apparently common (though undocumented) habit of scientists, on coming across an unfamiliar paper, to scan the list of references, and only secondly to examine its contents. In these last few paragraphs, I have been chiefly concerned with the way in which references are used to provide authoritative grounds to persuade readers

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of the validity and significance of the arguments in a paper. But for a paper to be regarded as important, it must not only present true and significant results; there must also be an element of novelty. Often the novelty arises from the use of new materials (data, theories or techniques) which are assumed to be unfamiliar to the intended audience, although they may be generally known among other sections of the scientific community.17 We can therefore expect that a proportion of the references in some papers will be to articles on subjects which lie outside the previous interests or knowledge of the intended audience.

THE EMPIRICAL EVIDENCE Let us now consider to what extent the approach to referencing outlined above is consistent with some of the empirical research which has used citation analysis. The Coles18 argue that the number of citations a paper receives is a guide to its quality, and that authors producing high quality papers tend to be more 'visible' to the scientific community and to receive more recognition, more awards and more prestigious posts than other scientists. In terms of the idea that referencing is an aid to persuasion, the link they have demonstrated between the quality of a paper and the number of citations it receives can be explained as follows. In order to support their research findings, authors will tend whenever possible to cite papers which they consider their audience will regard as presenting valid and important arguments and tesults. But once a paper has begun to acquire such a favourable reputation, it will become particularly valuable as a reference, and hence will be cited more frequently than the average, thus becoming increasingly visible to a growing audience. The result of this analogue to the 'Matthew effect'19 is that the distribution of the number of citations to papers is highly skewed, with a few 'exemplary' papers receiving very high rates of citation (until their contents are absorbed into the 'background' knowledge of the field) and the great majority getting one or no citations.20 Small and Griffith have used an analysis of citations for a quite different purpose: to explore the specialty structure of science. They suggest that cocitation (the citation of two documents together by a third) identifies relationships between papers which are regarded as important by authors in the specialty, and provides a natural and quantitative way to group or cluster the cited documents21, and thus reveals the structure and interrelationships between the research fields which produce these documents. Their method generates 'maps' which seem to have a considerable measure of validity. For instance, they show that the papers the method places closely together on their 'map' have similar or related titles, while papers with quite unrelated titles are widely separated. Their technique is successful because authors, in choosing references (and thus cocitation pairs) orient to their own perceptions of how the scientific community

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and its knowledge is structured. They place their work within a field by citing research which their intended audience values. Thus the co-citation analysis reveals the specialty structure by jointly tapping the individual perceptions of all the authors whose work has been examined.22 The last style of citation analysis I shall consider here is represented by two articles, one by Moravcsik and Murugesan, and the other by Chubin and Moitra. Although the methods used by these authors differ in detail, both are essentially concerned to classify references into a number of different types, depending on the relation of the cited paper to the content of the referring paper. Chubin and Moitra, for example, distinguish four classes of affirmative reference: basic, subsidiary, additional and perfunctory; and two negational: partial and total.23 The aim of these classifications is primarily to refine the analysis of citations for mapping and for the construction of measures of scientific growth and quality; nevertheless, these authors' empirical studies have yielded observations of interest in their own right, such as that the 'typical' paper contains few negational references but a 'large fraction' of perfunctory references (the numerical proportions reported in these two articles are 20% and 41%; the discrepancy arises from the different definitions of 'perfunctory' used by the two pairs of authors). These proportions of perfunctory references, those that merely acknowledge 'that some other work in the same general area has been performed',24 seem puzzlingly large. Perhaps authors cite such references in the hope of thus increasing the number of scientists who might recognize one or some of them; and who might therefore be persuaded that the citing paper may be of some interest or relevance to their own work. While this explanation may account for the citation of some references, the large proportions of perfunctory references these analysts report may rather be a product of the methodology they employ. Their methods of analysis take little or no account of the way in which research papers are directed towards the interests and knowledge of a particular audience as they exist at a specific point in time. The analyses assume that any reader who is reasonably familiar with the literature concerned can recognize references as instances of one or other of their categories. This, of course, is contrary to the view put forward above that referencing is essentially a device for persuasion; and that certain references will vary in their power of persuasion according to the opinions and concerns of those who are to be persuaded. In particular, their analyses assume that authors, participating researchers and competent readers will share a common reading of the significance and meaning of references. Let us briefly consider an example to show the inadequacy of these assumptions. The example is chosen because the details of the case are readily accessible; in other respects it can stand as typical of references in general. The reference I shall consider is to a paper by Gilbert and Woolgar, to be found in note 6 of Chubin and Moitra's own paper. The note in full reads as follows: A distinction between 'references' and 'citations' was introduced by D.J. de S. Price, 'Citation Measures of Hard Science, Soft Science, Technology and Non-science', in C. Nelson and D. Pollock (eds), Communication Among Scientists and Engineers (Lexington, Mass.: D.C. Heath, 1970), 3-32, esp. 7, then reiterated by G.N. Gilbert and S. Woolgar, 'The Quantitative Study

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of Science: An Examination of the Literature', Science Studies, Vol. 4 (1974), 279-94. We relax that distinction until the findings of our analyses are reported. At first, this seems to be an affirmative reference, but one which is not essential to the argument. This suggests that it should be classified as either 'additional' ('an independent supportive observation [idea or finding] with which the citer agrees'25) or 'perfunctory' ('referred to as related to the reported research without additional comment'26). However, neither category seems self-evidently appropriate. Whichever we choose, we have to 'bend' the definitions offered to accommodate this reference. Now consider the note as a whole. Two references are cited, and the second (the Gilbert and Woolgar paper) is said to 'reiterate' a distinction made in the first. Why, then, are both references given? An examination of Gilbert and Woolgar's paper shows that they introduced the distinction between references and citations without acknowledging Price's priority. The first sentence of the note could therefore be read as an implied admonishment to Gilbert and Woolgar for failing to give credit where it was due. Perhaps, then, this was intended to imply criticism, and should be classified as 'negational'. Since the intentions of the author are not normally available to the content analyst, there seems to be no way of conclusively resolving problems of classification such as those encountered in this example. The difficulties are more compounded when the analyst has only a superficial knowledge of the contexts in which the papers he examines were written and read. It is unlikely, for instance, that an analyst less familiar with the Gilbert and Woolgar paper than I am would have realized that the reference might possibly have been negational. But even when the analyst has all the available knowledge, fundamental problems of interpreting a given reference as an instance of one category rather than another remain.27

CONCLUSION I have argued for the value of regarding research papers as instruments of persuasion, and described how references can be analyzed as aids which increase a paper's power to persuade. But this approach can also be applied more generally. For instance, one can examine other techniques which may often be used by scientific authors to persuade their audiences. Another avenue of enquiry is suggested by the observation that, in general, the outcome of negotiations involving efforts at persuasion usually depends not only on the intrinsic quality of the arguments put forward, but also on the parties' relative power. The study of the effect of power on the construction and evaluation of scientific knowledge is, however, still in its infancy.28 Thus, implicit in the approach to a theory of citing I have suggested are a range of empirical and theoretical problems, most of which await detailed consideration.

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NOTES

1. H. Small and B.C. Griffith, 'The Structure of Scientific Literatures, I', Science Studies, Vol. 4 (1974), 17-40; B.C. Griffith et al., 'The Structure of Scientific Literatures, II', Science Studies, Vol. 4 (1974), 339-65;M.J. Moravcsik and P. Murugesan, Some Results on the Function and Quality of Citations', Social Studies of Science, Vol. 5 (1975), 86-92; D.E. Chubin and S. Moitra, 'Content Analysis of References: Adjunct or Alternative to Citation Counting?', Social Studies of Science, Vol.5 (1975), 423-41. 2. M.J. Mulkay, 'Methodology in the Sociology of Science', Social Science Information, Vol. 13 (1974), 107-19. 3. See especially S. Cole and J. Cole, 'Scientific Output and Recognition', American Sociological Review, Vol. 32 (1967), 377-90; but also J.R. Cole and S. Cole, 'Measuring the Quality of Sociological Research: Problems in the Use of the Science Citation Index', American Sociologist, Vol. 6 (1971), 23-29; D. Crane, 'The Academic Marketplace Revisited', American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 75 (1970), 953-64; D. Chubin, 'On the Use of the Science Citation Index in Sociology', American Sociologist, Vol. 8 (1973), 187-91; and N. Shanin-Cohen, 'Innovation and Citation' (Jerusalem: Hebrew University, 1974), unpublished mimeo. 4. S. Cole and J.R. Cole, 'Visibility and the Structural Bases of Awareness of Scientific Research', American Sociological Review, Vol. 33 (1968), 397-413; A. Bayer and J. Folger, 'Some Correlates of a Citation Measure of Productivity in Science', Sociology of Education, Vol. 39 (1966), 381-90; Richard D. Whitley, 'Communication Nets in Science', Sociological Review, Vol. 17 (1969), 219-33; and Paul D. Allison and John A. Stewart, 'Productivity Differences among Scientists', American Sociological Review, Vol. 39 (1974), 596-606. 5. Small and Griffith, and Griffith et al., ops.cit. note 1. 6. Moravcsik and Murugesan, and Chubin and Moitra, ops.cit. note 1. 7. N. Kaplan, 'The Norms of Citation Behaviour: Prolegomena to the Footnote', American Documentation, Vol. 16 (1965), 181. 8. J.R. Ravetz, Scientific Knowledge and its Social Problems (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), 256-57. 9. Thus Ravetz (ibid.) suggests that cited material may be crucial or merely incidental in the argument; it may have been central to the first formulation of the problem, or merely a late addition; and it may have been used as it was published or required extensive reworking. 10. G. Nigel Gilbert, 'The Transformation of Research Findings into Scientific Knowledge', Social Studies of Science, Vol. 6, Nos. 3/4 (September 1976), 281-306. 11. Cf. Kaplan, op.cit. note 7. 12. The equivalent effect is obtained by contesting published results which the intended audience believe to be false. 13. Cf. D. Silverman, Reading Castenada (London: Routledge and

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Kegan Paul, 1975), 82-84 et passim. 14. Many of these papers may also be regarded as 'exemplars' in the Kuhnian sense of the term (see T.S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2nd edn, 1970], 187-91). 15. M.J. Moravcsik, 'Measures of Scientific Growth', Research Policy, Vol.2 (1973), 269-70. See also the letters on 'Citation Analysis' by S.A. Goudsmit and John D. McGervey, Science, Vol. 183 (11 January 1974), 28-29. 16. D.J. de Solla Price, 'Is Technology Historically Independent of Science?', Technology and Culture, Vol. 6 (1965), 553-68. 17. Cf. M.J. Mulkay, 'Conformity and Innovation in Science', Sociological Review Monograph, Vol. 18 (1972), 5-24. 18. Cole and Cole, op.cit. note 3. 19. R.K. Merton, 'The Matthew Effect in Science', Science, Vol. 159 (5 January 1968), 56-63. 20. The highly skewed distribution of the number of citations among papers is described in D.J. de Solla Price, 'Networks of Scientific Papers', Science, Vol.149 (30 July 1965), 511. 21. Small and Griffith, op.cit. note 1, 19. 22. Small and Griffith do not point out the rather remarkable fact that individual scientists seem to have such compatible perceptions of the structure of science that a single map covering many disciplines can be constructed. 23. Chubin and Moitra, op.cit. note 1. 24. Moravcsik and Murugesan, op.cit. note 1,91. 25. Chubin and Moitra, op.cit. note 1. 26. Ibid. 27. A. Cicourel, Method and Measurement in Sociology (New York: Free Press, 1969), esp. 146-56. These problems of interpretation are recognized, but not avoided, in Chubin and Moitra's paper (cf. op.cit. note 1, 426). 28. But see S.B. Barnes, 'Science, Ideology and Pictorial Representation', paper read to the Conference on the Sociology of Science, University of York (16-18 September 1975), unpublished typescript; T. Pinch, 'What does a Proof do if it does not Prove?' (Department of Sociology, University of Bath, 1976), mimeo; and B. Wynne, 'C.G. Barkla and the J Phenomenon', Social Studies of Science, Vol. 6, Nos. 3/4 (September 1976), 307-48.