Social determinants of citations: An empirical analysis of UK economists

We investigate to what extent personal proximity and similarity in professional and political attributes, besides scientific factors, help explaining citations between economists. We do so by using a unique dataset of all academic economists based in the United Kingdom, created specifically for this study by merging RePEc data on works published in the past four decades with information collected by manually processing their curriculum vitae (CVs). We investigate directed citations within each pair of authors active in a same year, finding that social factors play an important role as predictors of citations. An author is systematically more likely to cite another economist not only if they work on similar topics, but most relevantly if they have been co-authors, faculty colleagues, alumni of the same Alma Mater, and even if they express similar political views. The implication is that citations do not signal the intrinsic quality of research outputs only, but they also capture social and professional connections. When citation counts are used to reward academics, economists have an incentive to join many and large professional communities as doing so would increase their predicted citations.