The marketisation of academic citations

I. The shared diagnosis

There is a cluster of projects I want to write about here—Bucket, PubChain, CiBit, CiteChain, the Impact Market, and others—and they all start from a diagnosis I share. A paper cited ten thousand times generates no revenue for its authors. The platforms that index and rank citations extract rent from a system that scholars produce for free. I do not think anyone who has looked closely would dispute the description. It is not a controversial claim, and it is not a new one.

What is new is the proposed remedy. They have converged, more or less independently, on the same answer, which is add a settlement layer. Make citation itself a thing that can be paid for, staked, or traded. Whilst I share the diagnosis, I do not share the remedy. And the more I think about why, the more I think the disagreement is not about tactics, or about implementation, but about what citation is.

II. Why a market failure does not require a market in citations

The current arrangement is often described as a market failure. It is certainly true that citation generates value: it directs attention, helps readers navigate scholarship, and builds reputation. Commercial platforms capture some of that value through indexing and ranking. But calling this a market failure does not settle the remedy. It does not tell us that what is missing is a market in citations.

I think the economics leave room for a different answer. Open citation information has the characteristics of a public good. My using a citation does not prevent you from using it, and an openly available record can be consulted and built upon by anyone. Producing, checking, and preserving that record still takes work. Public goods are often undersupplied by markets; that is itself a familiar form of market failure. But it does not follow that the remedy is to make the good scarce and tradeable. The question is how to support its provision.

This is where I part company with the proposed remedy. Where a project creates a tradeable citation token, it introduces a scarce asset around something that need not itself be scarce. Owning the token excludes others from owning that token. The market creates the scarcity it then prices. That does not, by itself, tell us how the arrangement will support the citation record or the scholarship behind it. It gives us something to trade. Whether it gives us a better way to sustain scholarship is another question.

Of course, one might object that the citation itself remains non-rivalrous, and it is only the token that is scarce. That is a real distinction, and I do not think my objection can rest on denying it. But neither do I think the distinction settles the matter. What happens when a financial claim is attached to the relation? Does it simply help to fund a practice that continues on its own terms, or does it change the reasons people have for citing, and the way those citations are read? My concern is the latter. The relation may remain freely visible while the incentives around it change. That is the transformation I want to examine.

III. What a market in citations would produce

Suppose citation becomes a tradeable asset. What follows?

First, financial returns can enter the decision to cite. Where participants stand to gain from particular citation patterns, relevance and intellectual debt are no longer the only considerations the system rewards. This does not mean every scholar will pursue the financial incentive. It means the infrastructure has created an additional reason to cite, and the design needs to explain how that reason interacts with scholarly judgement.

Second, the informational value of citation may change. A citation already has several meanings: it can acknowledge a debt, identify a method, locate a disagreement, or express approval. It is not a straightforward certificate of quality. Spence’s analysis of signalling helps frame the question of when an observable signal allows others to distinguish underlying characteristics. In his model, differences in signalling costs between types make that distinction possible. A financial incentive attached to citation introduces a further influence on the signal. The question is whether readers can still distinguish scholarly reasons for citation from financially motivated ones.

Third, a problem of selection may follow if financially manufactured citations cannot be distinguished from independent ones. Akerlof’s “market for lemons” shows how uncertainty about quality can change the composition of a market, including by driving higher-quality offerings out. A comparable process would require more than citation gaming: scholars whose work receives independent recognition would also have to lose confidence in, or withdraw from, the system. That is a possibility to investigate, not an outcome established merely by introducing payment..

Fourth, financialisation may intensify citation’s positional role. Citation already affects comparative standing in appointments, funding, and reputation. Hirsch’s account of positional goods helps explain why competition for relative position cannot be resolved simply by increasing the quantity available: not everyone can move above everyone else. But citation also has non-positional uses, including discovery and acknowledgement. The concern is that a financial market would strengthen competition for standing at the expense of those other functions.

IV. The performative problem

There is a further problem. The concern commonly expressed through Goodhart’s law is that a measure can become less reliable when it becomes a target. Citation counts already influence careers and funding; financial rewards would add another reason to optimise the count rather than the intellectual contribution it is taken to represent. Reciprocal citation and cartel formation are therefore not merely technical anomalies. Where the expected rewards exceed the costs and risks of coordination, the incentive to coordinate is built into the arrangement. Detection may limit that behaviour, but a convincing design must explain why legitimate scholarly contribution is rewarded more reliably than manipulation

V. What a citation is

There is a deeper question, which is not economic at all. What is a citation for?

A citation is a relation. It says: this work depends on that work. It is a trace of intellectual debt. It does not say what the work is worth; it says what the work owes. The distinction between value and price is not academic...and I mean that literally, it is not simply an academic distinction, though it is also that. Value can exist without a price. A relation can be real without being monetised. The market solution assumes that value must be priced to be realised. That is a theory of value, and it is the theory I am against.

Mauss, in The Gift, distinguished between the gift and the commodity. The gift carries the identity of the giver; the commodity is anonymous. Citation carries the identity of the cited work. Attaching a price need not erase the attribution. My concern is whether it changes the terms of the relation: an acknowledgement of intellectual debt becomes coupled to a transferable financial claim.. The citation becomes a commodity (a token with a price) and the relation it recorded becomes a transaction. I do not think this is an exaggeration. I think it is what the projects are proposing, and I think they would agree with the description. They would just disagree that it is a loss.

This is close to what Polanyi called a “fictitious commodity.” Land, labour, and money are not produced for sale, but are treated as if they were. Citation is like this: it is not produced for sale. The question is how organising it for exchange changes its purposes and conditions.

VI. The alternative

The alternative, if I am right about this, is not to build a better market. It is to refuse the market altogether.

Elinor Ostrom spent her career demonstrating that commons are not tragic. They are not failures of market provision; they are different forms of provision, governed by rules that communities develop. The register is a commons in this sense (or at least it tries to be). It records relations without pricing them. It treats citation as a relation to be held in common, not a good to be traded. It refuses the scarce good that the market would create. A work is in the register or it is not. There is nothing to win or trade, and nothing to lose.

This is a rejection of a particular theory of value: the theory that value must be priced to be real. A record can hold value without pricing it. It can show the relations through which works live without converting those relations into assets. Whether this is sustainable at scale is an open question. I do not know the answer. But it is a coherent alternative, and it rests on a different premise than the market projects: that the problem is not unpaid citation, but commodified citation.

VII. The difference

The market projects and the commons approach share a diagnosis. Both see that the current system extracts value from scholars and returns nothing. Both see an inequity in the way scholarly activity sustains commercial infrastructures without giving scholars corresponding control over them. I think we agree about the description. The difference is in what we think the problemis.

If the problem is that citation is unpaid, the market is a solution.

If the problem is that citation has been made into a commodity, the market is the disease.

The market projects choose the first diagnosis. They build a settlement layer, create a scarce good and price the relation. They are, I think, sincere about it, and I do not want to write as if they were not. They are responding to an inequity within our current system.

The commons approach chooses the second. It records the relation without pricing it. It refuses the scarce good. It treats citation as a commons, not a market

The difference is not between people who care and people who don’t. It is between two accounts of what has gone wrong, and of what scholarship needs. A citation can remain legible as a relation while a financial claim is attached to it. But that does not settle whether the attachment is desirable. My objection is that it gives financial returns a role in organising a practice whose primary task is to make intellectual relations intelligible. The register takes a different position: it records those relations without issuing assets or allocating financial rewards around them. That is not the absence of a theory of value. It is a decision about which forms of value this infrastructure exists to sustain.

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I write this as someone whose own intellectual lineage is at stake in the argument. My citations are not an abstraction to me. They are the relations through which my work lives. To price them would be to change what they are: to convert the record of a debt into a claim. That is not a transaction I want to make, and it is not one I think scholarship can afford. Perhaps I am wrong about that. But if I am, I would want to know why.