Evidence of complex citer motivations

Abstract

There were 20 scholars interviewed about their citation motives in recently published articles. Their 437 citations were scaled along 1 or more of the following 7 titer motives: currency, negative credit, operational information, persuasiveness, positive credit, reader alert, and social consensus. The majority (70.7%) of the references were attributed to more than 1 motive. Analysis of the clustering of the titer motives showed 3 groupings: (1) persuasiveness, positive credit, currency, and social consensus, (2) negative credit, and (3) reader alert and operational information. Negative credit references were often found to be used with a countervailing positive credit, currency, or social consensus reference. This is considered to be empirical evidence of MacRoberts and MacRoberts’ [8] hypothesis that scholars dissemble when giving nega. tive references.