Department of Psychology, Center for Brain, Biology & Behavior, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, B83 East Stadium, Lincoln, NE, 68588, USA.
Department of Psychology, Arcadia University, 119 Boyer Hall, Glenside, PA, 19038, USA.
Psychon Bull Rev. 2019 Jun;26(3):1020-1026. doi: 10.3758/s13423-018-1532-8.
Though citations are critical for communicating science and evaluating scholarly success, properties unrelated to the quality of the work-such as cognitive biases-can influence citation decisions. The primacy effect, in particular, is relevant to lists, which for in-text citations could result in citations earlier in the list receiving more attention than those later in the list. Therefore, how citations are ordered could influence which citations receive the most attention. Using a sample of 150,000 articles, we tested whether alphabetizing in-text citations biases readers into citing more often articles with first authors whose surnames begin with letters early in the alphabet. We found that surnames earlier in the alphabet were cited more often than those later in the alphabet when journals ordered citations alphabetically compared with chronologically or numerically. This effect seemed to be stronger in psychology journals (which have a culture of alphabetizing citations) compared with biology or geoscience journals (which primarily order chronologically or numerically) and was strongest among moderately and highly cited articles. Therefore, alphabetizing in-text citations biases citation decisions toward authors with surnames occurring early in the alphabet. These citation decisions result from an interaction between cognitive biases (more attention devoted to items earlier in a list) and the structure of the citation environment (the style in which citations are ordered). We suggest that journals using alphabetically ordered citations switch to chronological ordering to minimize this arbitrary alphabetical citation bias.
尽管引文对于交流科学和评估学术成就至关重要，但与工作质量无关的属性——如认知偏差——可能会影响引文决策。特别是首因效应与列表有关，如果将列表用于内文引文，则列表中较早的引文可能会比列表中较晚的引文受到更多关注。因此，引文的排序方式可能会影响哪些引文受到最多关注。我们使用了一个包含 15 万篇文章的样本，测试了在按字母顺序排列内文引文时，读者是否会更倾向于引用第一作者姓氏以字母表中较早字母开头的文章。我们发现，与按时间顺序或数字顺序排列引文相比，当期刊按字母顺序排列引文时，姓氏较早的引文比姓氏较晚的引文更常被引用。与生物学或地球科学期刊（主要按时间顺序或数字顺序排列）相比，这种效应在心理学期刊（有按字母顺序排列引文的文化）中似乎更强，并且在中度和高度引用的文章中最强。因此，按字母顺序排列内文引文会使引文决策偏向姓氏以字母表中较早字母开头的作者。这些引文决策是认知偏差（更关注列表中较早的项目）和引文环境结构（引文排序的方式）之间相互作用的结果。我们建议使用按字母顺序排列引文的期刊切换到按时间顺序排列，以最大程度地减少这种任意的字母引文偏差。
