A Discussion of citations from the perspective of the contribution of the cited paper to the citing paper

To more reasonably allocate a paper's credit, this article argues that both a paper's authors and references contribute to a given paper. Accordingly, we quantitatively represent the proportion of contributions from each author and reference to a paper. A paper's credit can be allocated among its authors and references based on their contributions. All papers carry innate credit because of publication. If cited, they also carry external credit from the citing papers. The proportion of a paper's credit allocated to references can be regarded as a credit output and serves as an input for these references. In this scenario, only the credit assigned to a paper's authors remains as the paper's deserved credit. The credit of papers can be transferred in a direction opposite that of knowledge diffusion. Via this method, the estimate of an individual reference's contribution incorporates content‐based citation analysis, a promising method to differentiate different citations. A paper's deserved credit represents the contribution of the paper's authors to the scientific community via the new knowledge they provide in the paper. Therefore, it is rational to evaluate papers according to their deserved credit, not the credit they carry.