Matched Case-Control Studies in Citation Analysis

The need to control for the effect of confounding variables is central to empirical research in many disciplines. In small‐scale studies it is often useful to do this at the designing stage (rather than in the analysis) by means of “case”‐“control” matching. It is suggested that this applies to citation studies as well. As an illustration the citation counts of papers by Israeli economists are compared with those of matched controls by American authors. This illustration highlights methodological and technical issues. It also serves to point out how small‐scale studies can generate interesting hypotheses.