Informational Citing Conformity: A Motivation for Citation to Multi-Author Articles

Abstract

It has seen in many studies that there is a significant relation between the number of authors in an article and its amount of perceived citations. In other words, the more the number of the authors, the more the possibility of perceiving citations. The present study thus is going to explain a kind of behavior, which is based on Citing Conformity factor. The research has been done in two parts: 1. Survey Method 2. Citation analysis method. The findings obtained from regression analysis test suggest that according to Informational Citing Conformity factor, 26% of changes in this type of behavior are predictable. It means, having a motivation for healthy thoughts and honesty and also selecting more credible source of information, the authors resort to cite the articles which were written by more authors. The results also indicated that Normative Citing Conformity is not a suitable predictor for this kind of motivation. The relationship between Citing Conformity Factors (Normative, Informational) and the motivation to cite multi author articles has been analyzed in this research for the first time.