Sources of IO Knowledge and Memory: A Citation Analysis of World Bank Publications

Where do policymaking international organizations (IOs) get their input information? How does that affect their policy output? What patterns do we observe across organizations? Even though bibliometric methods are widely used to analyze citation patterns of authors, journals, and disciplines, a similar analysis for IOs is missing. Citations are connections made to existing knowledge. They indicate what authors know, remember, and what authors want to relate to. Every citation is both memory and a strategic choice to emphasize some sources over others. Patterns in citation habits can reveal larger trends in the literature including citation clusters and gender bias. When institutional publications are considered, these patterns can also tell a story about the institutional culture and identity. For example, does the neoliberal economics-centered culture of international financial institutions affect their publications? Is there variation between citation patterns of articles on macroeconomics and social development? Do authors prioritize sources from their organizations over academic or civil society sources? I use World Bank position papers and journal publications to perform network analysis on the citations to see whether internal or external information is prioritized and whether there are significant differences among thematic fields of poverty reduction, gender equality, and the environment. Preliminary results show that the World Bank publications rely primarily on internal sources and peer-reviewed articles of economics, but turn to alternative sources on topics of social development.