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.

中文翻译：

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引用的社会决定因素：英国经济学家的实证分析

除了科学因素之外，我们还调查了专业和政治属性上的个人接近度和相似性在多大程度上有助于解释经济学家之间的引用。为此，我们使用了英国所有学术经济学家的独特数据集，该数据集是专门为本研究创建的，将过去四十年发表的作品的 RePEc 数据与手动处理他们的简历 (CV) 收集的信息合并起来。我们调查了同一年活跃的每对作者的定向引用，发现社会因素在预测引用方面发挥着重要作用。一位作者更有可能系统性地引用另一位经济学家，不仅是因为他们研究的主题相似，而且如果他们是共同作者、教职同事、同一母校的校友，则最相关。即使他们表达相似的政治观点。这意味着引用不仅表明研究成果的内在质量，而且还体现了社会和专业联系。当引用计数被用来奖励学者时，经济学家有动力加入许多大型专业社区，因为这样做会增加他们的预测引用次数。