Publication details
Stinné stránky síťování ve vysokém školství: citační bratrstva a inbreeding
| Title in English | The dark side of networking in higher education: citation cartels and inbreeding |
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| Authors | |
| Year of publication | 2016 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
| Citation | |
| Description | Our paper deals with problematic phenomena which go hand in hand with networking in academia and whose significance is seldom discussed. The aim of this paper is to draw attention to possible downsides of social networking in higher education, especially to the issues of so called citation cartels and inbreeding. Our paper builds on the assumptions underlying social network analysis (e.g. Wasserman & Faust, 1994), which emphasizes the ties among individual actors. By modelling these ties we can depict the structure of social networks and investigate the influence of this structure on the their functioning. So called citation cartels (also called citation stacking) are groups of researchers who, on the basis of previous agreement, cite each other’s works on purpose, by means of which they artificially improve each other’s citation indices (cf. Knecht & Dvořák, 2013, pp 569–571). Inbreeding is understood as a state in which universities employ their own graduates, which results in the lowering of their mobility and opportunities to gain experience from other environments than their alma mater also become more limited (cf. Altbach, Yudkevich, & Rumbley, 2015, s. 317–319). In both cases we can identify specific structures of social networks, with whose functioning and impact we deal in our paper. |