Should we introduce a dislike button for academic articles?

Agnieszka Geras , Grzegorz Siudem , Marek Gągolewski

Abstract

On the grounds of the revealed, mutual resemblance between the behaviour of users of the Stack Exchange and the dynamics of the citations accumulation process in the scientific community, we tackled an outwardly intractable problem of assessing the impact of introducing “negative′” citations. Although the most frequent reason to cite a paper is to highlight the connection between the two publications, researchers sometimes mention an earlier work to cast a negative light. While computing citation-based scores, for instance the h-index, information about the reason why a paper was mentioned is neglected. Therefore it can be questioned whether these indices describe scientific achievements accurately. In this contribution we shed insight into the problem of “negative” citations, analysing data from Stack Exchange and, to draw more universal conclusions, we derive an approximation of citations scores. Here we show that the quantified influence of introducing negative citations is of lesser importance and that they could be used as an indicator of where attention of scientific community is allocated.