"The Citation Fetish". Slides by Geoff Bilder from ReCon

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The Citation Fetish

Citation has become a much practiced and little-understood ritual in scholarly communication. It is simultaneously aggrandised with quasi-magical career promotion properties and (paradoxically) trivialised when it is conflated with “linking.” Citation, like so much of scholarly communication, has become distorted. As we rush to make data and software “first class” research outputs in scholarly communication, we are in danger of building a citation cargo cult – where we emulate the surface features and rituals of traditional citation without providing a sound infrastructure for the future evolution of scholarly communication.