The Citation Advantage of AI-Related Publications

Artificial intelligence (AI) is increasingly becoming an integral part of scientific research. Many publications across various fields now examine AI-related topics, including methodological innovations, technical applications, ethical considerations, and policy discussions. The number of these publications has grown rapidly, especially since the public release of advanced large language models such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT in late 2022. This rapid increase in scholarly publications raises an important question: Do AI-related publications attract greater academic attention, as measured by citations, than comparable research in the same fields and journals? This essay explores that question by analyzing recent AI-related publications and their performance on field- and journal-normalized citation indicators, as well as by discussing the potential reasons for this citation advantage and the challenges it presents for the research community. Evidence of Citation Advantage To investigate the citation impact of AI-related research, a dataset of 44,640 publications (including research articles, reviews, editorials, and letters) published between 2023 and 2024 was compiled from the Web of Science Core Collection. Each publication’s title included at least one AI-related keyword (e.g., Artificial Intelligence, AI, LLM, ChatGPT, GPT). The citation performance of these publications was evaluated using two field-normalized indicators from Clarivate’s InCites Benchmarking & Analytics platform. The Category Normalized Citation Impact (CNCI) measures a publication’s citations relative to the global average for its subject category, publication type, and year.1 Similarly, the Journal Normalized Citation Impact (JNCI) compares a publication’s citations with those of similar papers published in the same journal and year.2 In both metrics, a value […]