Bornmann & Leibel (2025) place outcome-favoring citation and cumulative advantage inside one "citation bias" framework — the first as its lead worked example, the second as a bias-generating mechanism in a separate section

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Lutz Bornmann and Christian Leibel's 2025 framework paper on citation accuracy, noise, and bias defines citation bias generically — "Citation bias refers to a systematic, directional error in citation decisions" — and gives as its one highlighted worked example the EBM-lineage mechanism already documented at claim-gotzsche-1987-first-demonstration-of-citation-bias-corroborated-by-ravnskov-and-duyx: "We would like to highlight just one example of citation bias here: Jannot et al. (2013) have found that there is 'a citation bias favoring [statistically] significant results ... in medical research. As a consequence, treatments may seem more effective to the readers of medical literature than they really are' (p. 296)." (The inner ellipsis is the paper's own.) Much later, in a separate section on aggregating citation decisions and the conditions under which the "wisdom of crowds" holds, the paper invokes the Matthew effect's own formal twin, Derek de Solla Price's cumulative advantage: "Price (1976) proposes a general theory of cumulative advantage processes (sometimes referred to as preferential attachment) in citation distributions." It then makes cumulative advantage a generator of bias rather than an instance of it: "The non-independence of citation decisions implies that citation errors are distributed non-randomly across cited papers, which in turn generates biases that do not average out when citation decisions are aggregated (unlike noise). Cumulative advantage and other mechanisms of non-independence therefore pose a serious challenge for citation analysis that cannot be resolved simply by using large datasets." Cumulative advantage is the companion term Merton introduced alongside "the Matthew effect" in the same 1968 Science paper (claim-merton-1968-coined-the-matthew-effect-in-science) — the same mechanism's own alternate name, not a rival one.

The two mechanisms therefore sit inside one paper's bias apparatus but at different levels and in different sections: the paper's own literature-overview appendix files Jannot under "Example of citation bias: favoring statistically significant results in medicine" and files Price (1976), Wang & Barabási (2021) and four cumulative-advantage studies under "Section: Aggregation of citation decisions." They are not enumerated side by side as co-equal members of a list, the way Haustein, Bowman & Costas (2016) enumerate theirs. The paper never uses the words "Matthew effect" at all — zero occurrences across all 62 pages, reference list and appendix tables included — reaching for "cumulative advantage" and "preferential attachment" instead, so a reader searching the exact phrase "Matthew effect" would not find this pairing. See observation-haustein-2016-and-bornmann-leibel-2025-narrow-but-do-not-resolve-citation-bias-matthew-effect-axis-question for how this bears on the open question alongside the companion Haustein, Bowman & Costas (2016) finding.