“The Citation Bias: Fad and Fashion in the Judgment and Decision Literature”, 1984 (; similar):
Examined whether selectivity was used in the citing of evidence in research on the psychology of judgment and decision making and investigated the possible effects that this citation bias might have on the views of readers of the literature.
An analysis of the frequency of citations of good-performance and poor-performance articles cited in the Social Sciences Citation Index 1972–9198143ya revealed that poor-performance articles were cited statistically-significantly more often than good-performance articles.
80 members of the Judgment and Decision Making Society, a semiformal professional group, were asked to complete a questionnaire assessing the overall quality of human judgment and decision-making abilities on a scale 0–100 and to list 4 examples of documented poor judgment or decision-making performance and 4 examples of good performance. Subjects recalled statistically-significantly more examples of poor than of good performance. Less experienced Subjects in the field appeared to have a lower opinion of human reasoning ability than did highly experienced Subjects. Also, Subjects recalled 50% more examples of poor performance than of good performance, despite the fact that the variety of poor-performance examples was limited.
It is concluded that there is a citation bias in the judgment and decision-making literature, and poor-performance articles are receiving most of the attention from other writers, despite equivalent proportions of each type in the journals.