Working Paper: NBER ID: w13891
Authors: Joshua Aizenman; Kenneth Kletzer
Abstract: 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.
Keywords: citations; academic research; citation death tax; economics; premature death
JEL Codes: B4; B54; C81; C92; L14
Edges that are evidenced by causal inference methods are in orange, and the rest are in light blue.
| Cause | Effect |
|---|---|
| premature death (I12) | reduced number of citations (A14) |
| longer time between publication and death (C41) | smaller missing citation ratio (A14) |
| premature death (I12) | annual cost of lost citations per paper (A14) |
| time elapsed since publication (C41) | missing citation rate (A14) |
| premature death (I12) | significant coefficients for missing citations (C29) |