Contrasting citation patterns across academic disciplines in French doctoral dissertations

Purpose This study aims to investigate how citation practices in doctoral theses have evolved over time, with a particular focus on the relative use of books and journal articles across academic disciplines. It aims to understand how these changes reflect broader transformations in scholarly communication and evaluation systems. Design/methodology/approach Drawing on a corpus of over 25,000 doctoral theses from the French national repository theses.fr, the study uses automated citation extraction methods to analyze large-scale trends in referencing behavior. A disciplinary lens is applied to track shifts over time, particularly within the social sciences and humanities. Findings The analysis reveals a general increase in the citation of journal articles across all fields, including disciplines where books have traditionally played a central role. This trend suggests that doctoral students are increasingly aligning their referencing practices with formats prioritized by research evaluation systems. Originality/value By combining large-scale data analysis with a critical perspective on academic publishing norms, this study contributes to understanding how early-career researchers are socialized into dominant forms of scholarly communication. It highlights the epistemic implications of shifting citation practices and provides new empirical evidence from a non-Anglophone context.