We analyze the extent to which citing practices may be driven by strategic considerations. The discontinuation of the Journal of Business (JB) in 2006 for extraneous reasons serves as an exogenous shock for analyzing strategic citing behavior. [We thank Douglas Diamond, the editor of the Journal of Business for 13 years, who told us that the main reason for the discontinuation was the difficulty in finding an editor from within Booth’s faculty.]
Using a difference-in-differences analysis, we find that articles published in JB before 2006 experienced a relative reduction in citations of ~20% after 2006.
Since the discontinuation of JB is unrelated to the scientific contributions of its articles, the results imply that the referencing of articles is systematically affected by strategic considerations, which hinders scientific progress.
