Lachance, C., Poirier, S., & Larivière, V. (2014). The kiss of death? The effect of being cited in a review on subsequent citations. Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology, vol 65, no 7, pp. 1501-1505.
This work investigates recent claims that citation in a review article provokes a decline in a paper’s later citation count; citations being given to the review article instead of the original paper. Using the Science Citation Index Expanded, we looked at the yearly percentages of lifetime citations of papers published in 1990 first cited in review articles in 1992 and 1995 in the field of biomedical research, and found that no significant change occurred after citation in a review article, regardless of the papers’ citation activity or specialty. Additional comparison was done for papers from the field of clinical research, and this yielded no meaningful results to support the notion that review articles have any substantial effect on the citation count of the papers they review.
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