Webster tit-for-tat citation study criticized

The punchline by Philip Davis:

So there you have it. The simple association between reference length and citations is spurious, confounded by such other simple explanations such as the length of the paper and the section in which it was published. There may still be evidence of mutual citation gaming in science, although this study cannot validate these claims.

Of Webster's earlier study:

http://ipbiz.blogspot.com/2010/08/as-to-getting-cited-by-others.html

Davis illustrates the fallacy of correlation --> causation with an illustration of the correlation between ice cream sales and murder rate ["ice cream sales are highly correlated with the U.S. murder rate " ]