"... the study, led by Alexander Oettl, an economist at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta"
"... negative citations are most likely to come from other researchers who are ... relatively far in geographical distance ... suggests that social factors — the awkwardness of contradicting someone whom you are likely to bump into in person — may play a part in science’s self-scrutiny."
"Michael Schreiber ... at the Technical University of Chemnitz in Germany ... thinks that the study’s definition of a negative citation might be too broad"
"Ludo Waltman ... at Leiden University in the Netherlands, agrees that the definition of negative citations used by Oettl’s team is broad"
It's probably not only geographic distance, but also relative size of the subfield that plays a factor -
Ever since my PhD I worked with a relatively minor plant and have been doing so for the last 5 years, I now know all "major" people in my sub-field and they know me, which made finding unbiased reviewers for my thesis quite hard.
I regularly bump into all of them at the same conferences, they are the only ones who can gauge my work for committees etc. Citing them negatively would be career-suicide (well, it depends on the cited person - a few would probably be alright and be happy that their work is being improved, others would deny my existence. I've actually published one paper improving another guy's work and showing his flaws, I've included him as an author to soften the blow, which isn't unethical since he also supplied some data, he did some work).
If I would work in a bigger field (say, HIV) it wouldn't matter so much.
"... negative citations are most likely to come from other researchers who are ... relatively far in geographical distance ... suggests that social factors — the awkwardness of contradicting someone whom you are likely to bump into in person — may play a part in science’s self-scrutiny."
"Michael Schreiber ... at the Technical University of Chemnitz in Germany ... thinks that the study’s definition of a negative citation might be too broad"
"Ludo Waltman ... at Leiden University in the Netherlands, agrees that the definition of negative citations used by Oettl’s team is broad"
Interesting series of events there.