LAUSR

Dear Sir, In our 2013 JASIS&T-article entitled “The Ripple Effect: Citation Chain Reactions of a Nobel Prize” (Frandsen & Nicolaisen, 2013) we explored the possible citation chain reactions of a Nobel Prize using the mathematician Robert J. Aumann (who shared the 2005 Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel with Thomas C. Shelling) as a case example. The results showed that the award of the Nobel Prize affected not only the citations to his work, but also affected the citations to the references in his scientific oeuvre. Farys and Wolbring (2017) present a rather harsh critique of the methods applied in our article. They claim that we have failed to take changes in database coverage into account, and that instead of doing “a simple comparison of citations before and after the reception of the Nobel Prize,” we should have operated with “an adequate control group.” Farys and Wolbring (2017) has attempted to replicate our 2013 study using Web of Science subject categories as pools for selecting documents similar to the Aumann-documents, which then forms a control group. Using this approach they fail to be able to replicate our findings. Instead, they find that “there is neither a Nobel Prize effect on citation impact nor a related chain reaction in the citation network.” However, Farys and Wolbring (2017) misrepresent the methods applied by us. Moreover, their own method for determining a control group using WoS categories has for quite some time been known to be highly problematic. Let us be a bit more specific: First, Farys, and Wolbring (2017) describe our dataset as follows: “Thomson Reuters added a new database, the Book Citation Index, to the WoS of Core Collection, on which Frandsen and Nicolaisen based their analysis.” As noted by Farys and Wolbring (2017), using the Book Citation Index would be highly problematic as it was published for the first time in 2005—the same year as Aumann was awarded the Nobel Prize. This is self-evident, and we have, of course, not used the Book Citation Index for our 2013 study. Indeed, the methods section of our paper clearly stated: