Haustein, Bowman & Costas (2016) name the Matthew effect and the "persuasion hypothesis" as two of four co-equal poles in one citation-distortion taxonomy

citation-biasmatthew-effectlegitimationpopularitysociology-of-sciencebibliometricscitation-theory

Stefanie Haustein, Timothy D. Bowman and Rodrigo Costas's chapter on citation and social theories — written to interpret altmetrics rather than to referee any specific empirical dispute — surveys social-constructivist citation theory (citations as rhetorical acts, not purely reward-based) and states: "The following describes four main sources of distortion or biases: persuasion hypothesis, perfunctory citations, Matthew effect, and negational citations." The "persuasion hypothesis" pole, attributed to G. Nigel Gilbert's 1977 framing, treats citations as "tools of persuasion," including — per White (2004), as the authors relay him — "'persuasion by distortion' that occurs when 'citers often misrepresent the works they allude to'" and "'persuasion with names'... linked to the disproportionate[] citation of works by established authorities to gain credibility through association." This is the structural twin of the EBM/clinical-epidemiology literature's "citation bias" (claim-gotzsche-1987-first-demonstration-of-citation-bias-corroborated-by-ravnskov-and-duyx, claim-greenberg-2009-citation-bias-names-selective-ignoring-of-contrary-data): selecting or weighting a citation to bolster a claim, independent of a neutral evaluation of the cited work's bearing on it. The Matthew effect pole is named directly from Merton: "the 'accruing of greater increments of recognition for particular scientific contributions to scientists of considerable repute and withholding of such recognition from scientists who have not yet made their mark'" (citing Merton 1968b, p. 58 — see claim-merton-1968-coined-the-matthew-effect-in-science).

The same passage also supplies, unprompted, the label bridge that the companion Bornmann & Leibel (2025) finding lacks: "Price (1976) demonstrated the Matthew effect mathematically for publications and citations and referred to it as cumulative advantage or success breeds success, showing that the probability of being cited increases with the number of citations already obtained," and "In network theory, the Matthew effect is referred to as preferential attachment, where nodes in a network accumulate new edges proportionally to their number of edges, leading to power law distributions (Barabási, 1999; Newman, 2001)." Haustein et al. thus state the three-way equivalence — Matthew effect = cumulative advantage = preferential attachment — citing the same Price (1976) that Bornmann & Leibel reach for while never naming Merton's label. The vocabulary mismatch between the two literatures is therefore bridged explicitly within this literature, not merely inferable across it.

This is the closest located source that literally names "Matthew effect" and sets it beside a legitimation-type mechanism as two of several co-equal, explicitly enumerated poles in one taxonomy — though the legitimation pole carries citation-theory's own label ("persuasion hypothesis," after Gilbert 1977) rather than the EBM literature's "citation bias" (a phrase that does not occur anywhere in the chapter), and the chapter does not cite Gøtzsche, Greenberg, or Duyx. See observation-haustein-2016-and-bornmann-leibel-2025-narrow-but-do-not-resolve-citation-bias-matthew-effect-axis-question for how this and the companion Bornmann & Leibel (2025) finding together bear on the open question.