If you narrow yourself to a specific niche well enough, you'll see the same names in citations. To be fair, the areas I dig into don't feel nearly as competitiv

If you narrow yourself to a specific niche well enough, you'll see the same names in citations. To be fair, the areas I dig into don't feel nearly as competitive as say, physics, which I couldn't make heads or tails of. The whole reason the internet and wikis took off is we were very liberal in how we linked. If we disallowed inbound citations, wouldn't it be a lot harder to backtrack and grasp contextual underpinnings? Anecdote: In the field of adult attachment theory <-> love there are a few prominent scholars that cite each other: Shaver, Hazan, Mikulincer. They do papers citing their own work and each other [1]. There's also a book by Mikulincer highlights Shaver's upbringing with his parents, his past as a hippy, etc. They're delivering very nice content, and they cite others outside their ("circle"?) Are there potentially scholars in the field with valuable contributions that go unnoticed? Possibly. It doesn't make self-citations in their papers any less helpful. Also I worry that regulating citations through some system may affect the quality of content and fix something that's not broken. Which brings me to another issue, aren't we supposed to be helping each other? [1] Example: http://adultattachmentlab.human.cornell.edu/HazanShaver1990.pdf http://adultattachmentlab.human.cornell.edu/HazanShaver1990....