Citation auctions as a method to improve selection of scientific papers

This paper describes the basis of citation auctions that are introduced as a new approach to selecting scientific papers for publication. Unlike the state of the art in paper selection that relies on peer reviews, our main idea is to use an auction in which bids consist of the number of citations that an author expects to receive if the paper is published. Hence, a citation auction is the selection process itself, and no reviewers are involved. The benefits of the proposed approach are two-fold. First, the cost of refereeing will be either totally eliminated or significantly reduced, because the process of citation auction does not need prior understanding of the paper's content to judge the quality of its contribution. Additionally, the method does not prejudge the content of the paper, so it will increase the openness of publications to new ideas. Second, scientists will be much more committed to the quality of their submitted papers, paying close attention to distributing and explaining their papers in detail to maximize the number of citations that the paper receives when published. Sample analyses of the number of citations collected via Google scholar for papers published in years 1999-2004 in a series of proceedings, and in years 2003-2005 in a series of conferences (in a totally different discipline) are provided. Finally, a simple simulation of an auction is given to outline the behaviour of the citation auction approach.