This paper investigates the impact of rhetorical citations in science, challenging the common assumption that they are solely detrimental. Using agent-based modeling, the authors simulate scientific communities with and without rhetorical citations to analyze their effects on citation-quality correlation, citation churn, and citation inequality. The results suggest that rhetorical citations can increase the correlation between paper quality and citations, enhance citation churn, and reduce citation inequality by redistributing citations from elite papers to a broader set of high-to-moderate quality papers.

Honglin Bao, Misha Teplitskiy