{"doi":"10.1371/journal.pone.0033339","title":"A Small World of Citations? The Influence of Collaboration Networks on Citation Practices","abstract":"This paper examines the proximity of authors to those they cite using degrees of separation in a co-author network, essentially using collaboration networks to expand on the notion of self-citations. While the proportion of direct self-citations (including co-authors of both citing and cited papers) is relatively constant in time and across specialties in the natural sciences (10% of references) and the social sciences (20%), the same cannot be said for citations to authors who are members of the co-author network. Differences between fields and trends over time lie not only in the degree of co-authorship which defines the large-scale topology of the collaboration network, but also in the referencing practices within a given discipline, computed by defining a propensity to cite at a given distance within the collaboration network. Overall, there is little tendency to cite those nearby in the collaboration network, excluding direct self-citations. These results are interpreted in terms of small-scale structure, field-specific citation practices, and the value of local co-author networks for the production of knowledge and for the accumulation of symbolic capital. Given the various levels of integration between co-authors, our findings shed light on the question of the availability of 'arm's length' expert reviewers of grant applications and manuscripts.","journal":"PLoS ONE","year":2012,"id":8470,"datarank":0.7009243251692859,"base_score":4.672828834461906,"endowment":4.672828834461906,"self_citation_contribution":0.7009243251692859,"citation_network_contribution":0.0,"self_endowment_contribution":0.7009243251692859,"citer_contribution":0.0,"corpus_percentile":null,"corpus_rank":null,"citation_count":106,"citer_count":0,"citers_with_citation_signal":0,"citers_with_endowment":0,"datacite_reuse_total":0,"is_dataset":false,"is_dataset_confidence":0.0436,"is_oa":true,"file_count":0,"downloads":0,"has_version_chain":false,"published_date":"2012-03-07","fair_score":null,"fair_percentile":null,"algorithm_id":"datarank_citation_only_1hop_v6","ranking_scope":"data_only","authors":[{"id":228,"name":"Vincent Larivière","orcid":"0000-0002-2733-0689","position":1,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":2841,"name":"Gingras, Yves","orcid":"0000-0002-4729-1269","position":2,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":61806,"name":"Matthew L. Wallace","orcid":"0000-0001-5407-8653","position":0,"is_corresponding":true}],"reference_count":34,"raw_metadata":null,"created_at":"2026-03-01T18:20:47.508186Z","pmid":null,"pmcid":null,"fwci":null,"citation_percentile":null,"influential_citations":0,"oa_status":null,"license":null,"views":0,"total_file_size_bytes":0,"version_count":0,"fair_f":null,"fair_a":null,"fair_i":null,"fair_r":null,"fair_zscore":null,"fair_rationale":null,"fair_model":null,"fair_agent_version":null,"fair_fulltext_source":null,"fair_has_llm":null,"fair_computed_at":null,"clinical_trials":[],"software_tools":[],"db_accessions":[],"linked_datasets":[],"topics":[]}