Citation behavior: A large-scale test of the persuasion by name-dropping hypothesis

Citation frequencies are commonly interpreted as measures of quality or impact. Yet, the true nature of citations and their proper interpretation have been the center of a long, but still unresolved discussion in Bibliometrics. A comparison of 67,578 pairs of studies on the same healthcare topic, with the same publication age (1–15 years) reveals that when one of the studies is being selected for citation, it has on average received about three...