Should we introduce a dislike button for academic articles?

There is a mutual resemblance between the behavior of users of the Stack Exchange and the dynamics of the citations accumulation process in the scientific community, which enabled us to tackle the outwardly intractable problem of assessing the impact of introducing “negative” citations. Although the most frequent reason to cite an article is to highlight the connection between the 2 publications, researchers sometimes mention an earlier work to cast a negative light. While computing citation-based scores, for instance, the h-index, information about the reason why an article was mentioned is neglected. Therefore, it can be questioned whether these indices describe scientific achievements accurately. In this article we shed insight into the problem of “negative” citations, analyzing data from Stack Exchange and, to draw more universal conclusions, we derive an approximation of citations scores. Here we show that the quantified influence of introducing negative citations is of lesser importance and that they could be used as an indicator of where the attention of the scientific community is allocated.