UPDATED 20 September: New V2 version of the working paper includes new charts, a more comprehensive table, and edits and improvements courtesy of new author Dr. Rian D. Dewhurst.
The first working paper from DARI examines how citations - a measure of the impact of a publication has made in its field - can be persistent even after the findings from that work have been proven wrong.
The discourse around Bitcoin has been deeply entrenched for a number of years. The narrative that Bitcoin uses too much energy, produces CO2, results in unacceptable e-waste, or a number of other unsupported claims persist in discussion because early authors without reliable data have established a sort of baseline of perception. New papers that use primary data and methodological rigour have demonstrated these early claims to be badly out of step with reality.
This working paper shows how accumulations of citations can be a kind of proxy for influence and how hard it can be for the next generation of higher quality publications to gain traction in the narrative.
