The role of highly intercited papers on scientific impact: the Mexican case

Abstract

The present paper explores the relationship between highly intercited papers in the k-max of citation networks and an author’s impact from the Mexican National System of Researchers (SNI). We investigate whether a more interconnected network, a higher k of the k-max, explains the variation of the total number of citations, controlling for personal characteristics such as SNI level, area of expertise, and the number of publications. We find that the k-max is positively and significantly correlated with impact. In this context, we find that the share of self and collaborator-citations increases with the magnitude of the k-max and women tend to have less interlinked cores of their citation networks than men (smaller k’s). Interestingly, we find that women tend to have a higher share of third-party citations while men tend to have a higher share of self and collaborator-citations, for all k’s and areas of expertise. We conduct a Blinder–Oaxaca decomposition to better understand the citation gender gap and find that much of it can be explained through the differences in observable characteristics (including the k-max) between women and men.