Dying is not always good for your citations:
The information content of academic citations is subject to debate. This paper views premature death as a tragic "natural experiment," outlining a methodology identifying the "citation death tax" — the impact of death of productive economists on the patterns of their citations. We rely on a sample of 428 papers written by 16 well known economists who died well before retirement, during the period of 1975-97. The news is mixed: for half of the sample, we identify a large and significant "citation death tax" for the average paper written by these scholars. For these authors, the estimated average missing citations per paper attributed to premature death ranges from 40% to 140% (the overall average is about 90%), and the annual costs of lost citations per paper are in the range 3% and 14%. Hence, a paper written ten years before the author’s death avoids a citation cost that varies between 30% and 140%. For the other half of the sample, there is no citation death tax; and for two Nobel Prize-caliber scholars in this second group, Black and Tversky, citations took off overtime, reflecting the growing recognitions of their seminal works.
Here is the paper. As I interpret it, some people are trading (usually barter) for many of their citations and death hinders those trades. These people are overrated to begin with. Black and Tversky, on the other hand, are still underrated. Bet on those scholars whose citations rise with their deaths.
A contributing factor may be that premature death (what the heck is “mature” death anyway?) prevents authors from developing their ideas fully through a series of papers, thereby lowering the overall impact of their body of work and reducing the number of cites their already written papers receive.
I am a little hesitant to attribute a big effect to citation trading, I suspect the effect would be way too small to affect cite counts much for really well-known economists. I haven’t read the paper yet, though, so I am not really sure how large the magnitudes would have to be.
Although citation trading no doubt exists, other things also contribute to professional presence. It’s probably unfair to some people whose professional presence boosts their citations to call them “overrated”. Their work might simply be better known because they have made more contributions to the profession as discussants, mentors, etc.
Not to mention that people presumably get lot of (not necessarily traded) citations by doing personal promotion of their ideas, in the form of talks. Also, people can get citations by having students, who then do work building on their older work. Both of these don’t work well for the dead.
Aspiring poets who sincerely want to be famous have been receiving a standard piece of advice for nearly two centuries: “Die young.” Clearly, aspiring economists need other guidance: “Trade early and trade often.” perhaps? It seems a pity if we can only offer them a barter market in which to do so.
This seems pretty simple to me — if you are dead, you cannot go to conferences, nor email back and forth with other researchers, and therefore you cannot promote your work into other people’s attention. But if you’re famous, and you die, that makes you more famous, and people think about your work more.
I would agree that there are other aspects of being alive that can help one get cited besides citation
trading, some of them benign. Thus, being able to defend one’s turf, going to conferences, having
students who will cite one more, and simply publishing, which brings ongoing attention to one’s work.
I would also agree that those whose citation rates go up with death, probably deserve the increased rate.
Yet another aspect that has not been mentioned is self-citation; obviously these stop with one’s death.
What about the price of art? Same result?
self-citations perhaps?
You can buy and gain very cheap holic money.
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