Praise the Bridge that Carries You Over: Testing the Flattery Citations Hypothesis

Abstract : Flattery citations of editors, potential referees, etc. has been claimed to be a common strategy among academic authors. From a sociology of science perspective, as well as from a citation analytical perspective, it is both an interesting claim and a consequential one. The paper presents a citation analysis of the editorial board members entering American Economic Review from 1984 to 2004 using a citation window of 11 years. In order to test the flattery citations hypothesis further we have conducted a study applying the difference-in-difference estimator. We analyse the number of times the editors and editorial board members of the American Economic Review were cited in articles published in the journal itself as well as in a pool of documents comprising of articles from Journal of Political Economy and Quarterly Journal of Economics. The results of the analyses do not support the existence of a flattery citation effect.