I caught a quick post today from Tim Finin on Semweb-focused blog “UMBC ebiquity” that talked about the relationship between a high number of citations in scholarly and white papers and how often that paper itself is cited.

The number of citations a paper receives is generally thought to be a good and relatively objective measure of its significance and impact.

Nature news reports on research by Gregory Webster that analyzed the 53,894 articles and review articles published in Science between 1901 and 2000.

“There is a ridiculously strong relationship between the number of citations a paper receives and its number of references,” Gregory Webster, the psychologist at the University of Florida in Gainesville who conducted the research, told Nature. “If you want to get more cited, the answer could be to cite more people.”

The advice the study supports is “cite and you shall be cited”.

It’s generally good advice, albeit somewhat commonsense in my experience. Part of the power of the hypertext format in general and the platform of blogging and the web in specificity, is that one is able to pack a great deal more authority into one’s words with proper (if not liberal) usage of hyperlinked citations.

There’s power in that, and for those who have an audience that reads them because of their authority (either real or perceived), the more sources you base your conclusion off of, the more likely it is that people are to believe your words and share your writings.  This is because people perceive either a keen sense of analysis on your part (because you’re finding commonalities and consensus amongst a broad set of sometimes disparate data sets), or that they’re perceiving a consensus with your viewpoint due to a mountain of data that agrees with you.

How to Use This Technique to Game People’s Opinions

I’ve always been a slightly argumentative sort online.  At times, I feel a bit like the internet’s ombudsman, since the type of stories that often move me to write passionately are when I spot influential folks taking absurd stances on the issues. If you read my posts often, you’re probably well aware of this.

This tendency of mine goes back to when I first started writing for the public – the first instance my opinionated words appeared before more than just my teachers was when I wrote an editorial that rebutted something written in my high school newspaper. The original piece cited a number of studies and personal anecdotes that pegged the Internet as nothing more than a place for stalkers and creeps. My rebuttal relied on debunking the underlying studies used to support her position and the sensationalistic spin she put on them.

Similarly, and on a more grander scope, back in 2005 I wrote a sequence of posts on my personal blog thoroughly debunking a major news story at the time carried by CNN and most of the major newswires that allegedly “conclusively proved that global warming was irrefutable, and causing the drastic uptick in hurricanes.”

Over a series of posts, I dissected the individual sources for that story, done at MIT, and it turned out that the person compiling the research paper had done no actual original research, and simply had compiled numbers from other existing studies, many of which had not done the original research themselves.  It took many layers of clicking on hyperlinks at the bottom of PDF files to find the original studies, which mostly turned out to be funded by lobbyist groups looking to increase funding from congress to their non-profit eco-protection rackets.

The MIT study, however, received mainstream coverage, and was used throughout the 2006 election cycle by folks from both sides of the political aisle as a reason to increase funding to ecology initiatives aimed at reducing man-made global warming.

Between 2004 and 2007, I did a number of articles that conclusively debunked a number of similar studies that were done that were generally intended to debunk the effectiveness of abstinence-based educational curriculum. At the time, there were no independent third party studies done that conclusively showed that abstinence-based education was generally ineffective (though some studies have come out since then that put these educational programs’ effectiveness in question).

The studies I reviewed all fit the same profile: they cited dozens and dozens of studies done by organizations with neutral sounding names, the data they cited all supported a conclusion the researcher seemed to have held before his study began, the organizations with neutral sounding names all had funding from decidedly biased organizations, and all the final studies were commonly cited by mainstream media at the time as “incontrovertible.”

At the time, my aim in profiling these studies was to show the fallibility of the mainstream media in propagating bad information. Here we are in the social media age, and still the same things keep happening. Wasn’t it just a week ago we were all taken in by a few hoaxters and a pretty face who pretended to quit her job with a whiteboard?

People Generally Don’t Click on Links

This is most easily evidenced by Twitter users’ bit.ly logs. Scarce are there the bit.ly logs that show as many click-throughs as there are retweets or Twitter followers. Most people don’t even read the article, but of those who do, fewer still will go over every link to its original source to divine the possible bias inherent in that author or researcher.

Hence it’s pretty easy to game people’s brains by “faking” authority in this manner.

Fortunately, I think this is a problem that a combination of social media evolution and technology can solve.

Everyone, Even the Mainstream, Gets More Sophisticated with Experience

As time progresses, everyone on the web gets more sophisticated.  What passed for explosively viral ten years ago (like the Star Wars kid) is passé these days. Certainly, oddly mundane things continue to go viral (“Double Rainbows” spring immediately to mind), but thanks to a more savvy and populous online denizenry, incorrect rumors often are rebutted and disproved in hours or minutes, rather than allowed to go uncorrected for days or even in perpetuity.

One of the reasons I think that many online reputation systems fail at the outset is that they don’t do as good of a job at weeding out disreputable or incorrect information than our own brains.  As neural scientists tell us, if equated to modern computing, the brain is best at pattern matching, which is why we learn from better from experience than rote memorization.

Thus the technologies we use and the algorithms we rely on to sort our news gradually improve over time.  If someone in our social network of friends has a habit of sharing out bad information, we naturally tend to either mentally discount data fed to us from that person, or remove them from our network completely. If a source of information habitually gives us information we find to be negatively biased or fundamentally flawed on a consistent basis, we have the ability in many of our tools to filter that source out of our views completely, and the human tendency is to do so.

I’m somewhat of an optimist when it comes to these things, admittedly, but one that’s focused on reality. As someone who lives in the torrential river of news online, I’ve noticed a definite shift in the currents when it comes to misinformation and disinformation over the last ten years. Un-refuted disinformation was quite commonplace in the mainstream media landscape, with only a precious few dissenting voices. These days, it’s hard to find anyone putting out slightly off-base information, let alone disinformation, that goes uncorrected.