Reasons for citation; why would you cite an author or the work?

What are the reasons and motivations for citing the work of others or yourself?  Are all citations equal? I want to list as many reasons as I can find.

Following Lena Lindgren I will distinguish 3 kinds of reasons:  Publication dependent, author dependent or other reasons. I will use Lena’s set as base set but I will add some more reasons as I collect them along the way.

Publication-dependent reasons

1. Identify related body of work
2. earlier work on which current work builds
3. Best/most relevant work on the subject
4. Substantiate claims/establish precedence
5. No other sources of data
6. Using/giving credit to ideas, concepts, theories, methodology, and empirical findings by others.
7. Identifying original publications in which an idea or concept was discussed, ‘classics’.
8. Mentions of other works (‘see also’, ‘see for example’) without further reference.
9. The cited publication is an overview in the field.
10. The content of the cited publication is of a high quality.
11. Criticizing the work of others.
12. Providing background reading, to give ‘completeness’.
13. Substantiating, legitimating own statements or assumptions.
14. Alerting to forthcoming work.
15. The cited publication is frequently cited by other authors in the field.
16. The cited publication has been seriously criticized by other authors in the field.
17. The cited publication is a recent one on a ‘hot’ topic.
18. Critically analyze/correct earlier work
19. Of equally valid sources, chose this one
20. Ease of access to the cited work

Author-dependent reasons

1. Establish writer’s authority in the field
2. Paying homage to pioneers/giving credit for related work.
3. Ceremonial citation, the author of the cited publication is regarded as ‘authoritative’.
4. The author of the cited publication is a man.
5. The cited publication is written by a large number of co-authors.
6. Maintaining of professional and/or social connections.

Other reasons

1. Demonstrating familiarity with important literature.
2. Demonstrating familiarity with prestigious journals.
3. Demonstrate scholarship (e.g. excessive self-citation).
4. Appealing to editors, readers or reviewers in which the citing publication is published.
5. The cited publication is easily available for examination.
6. Political pressure
7. Raise citation count

Related Articles

• To be the best, cite the best (nature.com)

A new measure of esteem: prestige or how often is a researcher cited by highly cited researchers?

Ding and Cronin make a nice distinction between popularity and prestige of a researcher; popularity of a researcher is measured by the number of times he is cited
by all papers in a dataset; the prestige of a researcher by the number of times he is cited by highly cited papers in the same set.  A scholar may be highly cited but not highly regarded: popularity
and prestige are not identical measures of esteem. The authors focus primarily on authors rather than journals.

Popularity vs. Prestige
Popularity and prestige exist in the following possible relations:
High popularity-high prestige, High popularity-low prestige, Low popularity-high prestige and Low popularity-ow prestige

 

Source: http://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1012/1012.4871.pdf

Popular and/or Prestigious? Measures of Scholarly Esteem
Ying Ding, Blaise Cronin
School of Library and Information Science, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN 47405, USA
Abstract
Citation analysis does not generally take the quality of citations into account: all citations are weighted equally irrespective of source. However, a scholar may be highly cited but not highly regarded: popularity and prestige are not identical measures of esteem. In this study we define popularity as the number of times an author is cited and prestige as the number of times an author is cited by highly cited papers. Information Retrieval (IR) is the test field. We compare the 40 leading researchers in terms of their popularity and prestige over time. Some authors are ranked high on prestige but not on popularity, while others are ranked high on popularity but not on prestige. We also relate measures of popularity and prestige to date of Ph.D. award, number of key publications, organizational affiliation, receipt of prizes/honors, and gender.