Intellectual and Social Predictors of Citations to Scientific Articles

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This project examines the relative importance of social and intellectual factors in the distribution of influence or recognition in diverse segments of the scientific community. The unit of analysis is not the individual scientist, but the basic element of the communication system: the scientific article. Since articles contain the intellectual contributions in science, the study of their characteristics provides a means of uniting several of the divergent approaches used in the sociology of science. In a regression analysis used to predict citations to scientific articles, the predictor variables will be classified into two categories: author (social) variables and article content (intellectual) variables. The relative importance of these two sets of variables will be examined in several different research areas, which vary in their levels of intellectual integration.