Do the author's name and/or affiliation affect the visibility of a paper?

Question

Suppose two papers were published by fledgling researchers, perhaps PhD students, who are yet unknown in their field. One is Asian, has a surname which is long and difficult to pronounce, and perhaps also comes from a relatively unknown university. The other has an English name, and comes from a well-known university. But otherwise, the two papers are similar in content and on par in terms of quality.

Ideally, there should not be any preference with regards to citing either of the two papers. That means, in the long run, the expected citation counts of the two papers should be about the same. However, I am interested to know whether this is the case in reality. From my limited experience, I seem to have seen papers that referenced only other papers whose authors are European. Has there been any study that suggests whether the name and/or affiliation of an author affect the visibility and hence the citation count of his/her paper? I am aware that the answer might be different for different fields.

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To ask the question in another way, is our perception of a paper influenced by the authors' names and/or affiliations? Do we not tend to infer the quality of a paper by these factors?

Answer 1

The short answer (from the view of an economist) is: Probably not. At least not in the way you suggest.

However, for most (i.e., not the most influential papers/journals) papers most of the citations (especially for PhD students) are "generated" by feedback from conferences, referees, supervisors, ... . Therefore, someone from Europe is more likely to encounter someone who knows the European paper and therefore only cites the paper from Europe. In addition, researchers from well-known universities have more visibility and are more likely to know the topic of papers from PhD students at their department.

So, even if there is is no discrimination with regards to the name and the affiliation we could observe the effect you described.

I do not know of any study covering your question, and I do not think there is a way to do such a study.

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To ask the question in another way, is our perception of a paper influenced by the authors' names and/or affiliations? Do we not tend to infer the quality of a paper by these factors?

I guess that depends on the person. I (and most people I know) are heavily influenced by the journal it is published in, not at all by the authors' name (to clarify: We are influenced by the fact if we know the person or not, but not by how the origin of the name / how the name looks like.) and maybe a little bit by the affiliation of the author if it is a top 5 or top 10 institution in the specific field of research.

Answer 2

Has there been any study that suggests whether the name and/or affiliation of an author affect the visibility and hence the citation count of his/her paper? I am aware that the answer might be different for different fields.

I have no study at the ready, but I have often wondered the same and can provide some speculations.

You bring up the following factors that might play into whether a work may be higher cited:

• Status of the researcher
• Name
• Status of university

For computer science, the first point is usually not all that important, as the vast majority of papers have both PhD students and professor(s) as authors. I also don't believe that the status of the university very much plays into the decision whether a paper will be cited. At least for me, I never even remember which institution(s) an interesting paper comes from, unless I know the authors personally. I just don't consider that particularly relevant information. Interestingly, I remember universities more for papers from asian authors (see also next paragraph), as "National University of XY" is much better discriminator for me than most asian names. However, it's not that better universities stick more in my mind than smaller ones. To be honest, I can hardly judge the quality of asian universities outside of Singapore (where I stayed for a research visit once) anyway, except for absolute top institutions.

Now, whether the "memorability" of the name is relevant is an interesting question. For me it is certainly easier to remember US / european names than asian or indian ones. Critically speaking, I also have the strong impression that I cite more European or US authors than asian ones. However, I am 100% convinced that this also works the other way. Whenever I browse over papers by asian authors, they also seem to cite almost exclusively other asian authors, presumably for similar reasons. Whether this all evens out in the end I don't know, but I also don't really know whether there is anything that can really be done about it.

Answer 3

For multi author papers coming from well know labs I would be surprised if the surname of the junior author had much impact on citations since the popularity of the paper is going to be driven by the PI. For single author papers or unknown labs there could be a noticeable effect, but again I doubt it. I think most people search for literature based on key words wether it is an electronic search or a skimming of table of contents. If the authors or university Is know that clearly will increase the chance of citation. For unknown authors and universities, there is enough bias in this world, both justified and unjustified, that my guess is that there would be a correlation between citations and names.