Exploring prestigious citations sourced from top universities across disciplines

There have been many studies on the factors influencing paper citation counts. A number of studies have focused on the citing papers, and corresponding methods were proposed to measure the prestige of citations based on the journal impact factors, the total citation counts and the PageRank algorithm values. However, there are drawbacks to these methods. In this paper, we propose a novel method to identify prestigious citations from the affiliation of the citing paper. Specifically, if the authors of the citing paper are affiliated with a prestigious university, the citing paper could be counted as a prestigious citation. As a pilot, we used the top 200 universities on the QS World University Rankings 2015 to identify the prestigious universities so that the prestigious citations, named as QS citations, were identified accordingly. Experimental results validated that QS citations have more important impact on the cited papers than other citations. Papers with QS citations have better performance across most disciplines not only in total citation counts, but also in altmetrics such as the Altmetric Attension Score and Mendeley reader counts.