Cite the Good Cite: Building a Better Psychology Through Citations

Citations are the bedrock of scientific communication. They convey what is known and when it was discovered and point to a specific source that contains evidence for a claim. 

Citations differentiate personal anecdotes and vibes-based speculation from scientific knowledge generation and information synthesis. Anyone who has seen one internet poster yell at another to “cite your sources!” knows that the value placed on citations is not merely a scientific endeavor—the importance of building a logical, evidence-based argument via citations is ubiquitously understood. And citing quality is not just a matter of what works are included but also how a reference is incorporated in-text; consequently, it is important to thoughtfully contextualize each citation (Gernsbacher, 2018; Lavigne & Good, 2017).  

So, what happens to our psychological literature when a researcher chooses to cite a study they haven’t read, or that they haven’t even laid their eyes on? What about when they use artificial intelligence tools to outsource citing and end up with “hallucinated” citations that don’t actually exist (Walters & Wilder, 2023)? Unsurprisingly, these poor citing decisions undermine the evidentiary value of arguments in psychology and destabilize our scientific process more broadly. 

The importance of citing decisions 

When researchers cite inadequately, inaccurately, inappropriately, or inconsistently, they undermine the collaborative accumulation of knowledge (Cobb et al., 2024). Despite their importance, citations are woefully underdiscussed in psychological science, with most conversations happening between sociologists of science and information scientists. But, as the individuals who are writing, reviewing, editing, and reading the psychological literature, we psychologists should reorient our attention to citations, at least to the extent that they influence the quality and impact of our research. In a forthcoming article for Advances in Methods and Practices in Psychological Science (AMPPS), our author team set out to understand how citing decisions are made in psychology, why scholars make poor citing decisions, what psychological processes underpin these missteps, and how citing decisions can block the pathway to a more cumulative and inclusive science (Lawson, Murphy, et al., 2025). 

Our focus on citing decisions is deliberate—each citation an author references (or not) is an intentional choice. Like many phenomena in social psychology, citing decisions are susceptible to “satisficing” (what Rekdal [2014] called “academic shortcuts”) and heavily influenced by systems and structures, including norms in research labs and unspoken customs of publication culture. Although many academics would like to “publish less, read more” (Phaf, 2020), our field-wide publish-or-perish mentality often runs counter to good citing practice. As one example, researchers can save time by citing the first result that pops up for some keywords on Google Scholar. But this service’s display logic considers prior citation counts in deciding how results show up on your screen (Beel & Gipp, 2009), which leads to highly cited (but not necessarily relevant) works being the most prominent and contributes to the proliferation of the Matthew effect in citations. This “rich get richer, poor get poorer” dynamic undermines knowledge accumulation and disproportionately harms minoritized scholars, including women researchers (Yan et al., 2024) and scientists of color (Kwon, 2022; Reddy & Amer, 2022). 

Strategies to improve citing decisions 

As part of our recent paper, we surveyed a sample of editorial board members across 23 psychology journals on their perceptions of citing decisions in the field (N = 213). Eighty-six percent of respondents at least slightly agreed that “thus far, our field has not paid enough attention to improving the quality of citing decisions.” Fortunately, this need not remain true. Our author team is genuinely optimistic about psychologists’ ability to improve citing decisions on both individual and system-wide levels. As active researchers, we recognize that the best advice is humble and self-aware (Hoekstra & Vazire, 2021); importantly, it should be advice we would want to implement ourselves. Below, we emphasize three ways that we have worked to improve our own citing decisions with the hope that these strategies might help you, too.  

Consider citing to be an act of gratitude for the researchers whose work you built upon. 

Our first strategy is to think about citing as a privileged opportunity to publicly thank predecessors for their work. Imagine, for a moment, all of the time, effort, money, and frustration that other psychologists have put into our field to identify patterns, theorize, solve methodological quandaries, collect and analyze data, and expand psychological knowledge. Authors have the unique opportunity to acknowledge these contributions, making important prior work explicit in a clear, evidentiary chain.  

Furthermore, citations are a source of academic currency (Wang et al., 2021). If you think about your citation “purchasing power,” you can focus on using citations as a free way to express gratitude to the scholars whose ideas have sincerely shaped your own thinking. 

Cite only work that you have directly accessed and read. Don’t rely on other scholars to have cited accurately. 

At first glance, this advice may seem to simply repurpose the banal platitude to “see for yourself.” But when it comes to citations, you really do need to see the evidence for yourself. Lay eyes on the article. Read all relevant components. Identify what claims the authors made and how they dovetail with the work you are doing. Although our first gratitude-based strategy emphasizes appreciating citing experiences (a citation-focused carrot), some readers will find that sticks are more effective for behavior change. If that’s you, remind yourself of the American Psychological Association’s publication manual, which includes the admonition to “cite only works that you have read and ideas that you have incorporated into your writing” (APA, 2020, p. 253). In addition, consider estimates that one in 10 citations in psychology are inaccurate, such that they completely mischaracterize the cited study’s findings (Cobb et al., 2024). 

In situations when you cannot easily access a prior study, you can try to email an author to ask for a copy. You can also steer your literature review toward open-access works. This situation highlights again the purchasing power of your citation and how you can use citations to build the future of psychological science that you wish to see. Citing work published in open-access journals and/or work that is freely accessible on preprint servers like PsyArXiv can encourage authors to make their work broadly available to everyone, increasing the reach of knowledge beyond paywalls.  

There is no one-size-fits-all solution to better citing, so focus on whatever inspiration motivates you. Engaging in high-quality citations will support multiple goals simultaneously. 

In our survey of editorial board members, our authorship team found incredible diversity in the solutions offered to improve citing decisions. Suggestions ranged from creating more formalized guidelines for authors and improving graduate training to creating more robust mechanisms to “ding” authors in the review process for poor citations. Some participants thought that abolishing citation limits would solve problems, while others found copious citations troublesome and thought authors should be limited to a maximum of a few dozen references. From these heterogeneous suggestions, we are confident that there is no one-size-fits-all solution to improving citing decisions. Different researchers have different motivations and the way that they implement effective solutions will be influenced by their own unique preferences. Improving citing decisions should not create a more homogeneous literature; greater attention to high-quality citations will instead magnify individual differences. 

Individual differences in citing decisions are one reason why this topic should be appealing to scholars with wide-ranging interests, including those interested in reproducibility and science reform (Horbach et al., 2021) and in diversity, equity, and inclusion (Dworkin et al., 2020; Fox Tree & Vaid, 2022). Citations are central to both cumulativeness and inclusiveness of psychological research, so they can serve as a link connecting reproducibility-focused and equity-focused researchers. 

High-quality citations undergird the scientific process and are foundational to robust psychological research. It’s time that scholars give citations the attention they deserve. For more detail about citing decisions in psychology (and many more thoughtful citations), we point interested readers to our forthcoming AMPPS article. 

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