Do the best papers have the highest probability of being cited?

If scholars suffer from imperfect attention, they will not always cite the best paper on a particular topic. The most chosen scholarly works may merely be the most cited ones, not the best articles. Here, a paper is chosen when someone cites it, after paying attention to it. Manuscripts’ authors might affect preferences by using salience to influence what scholars pay attention to. In our work, paying attention to an article is when someone reads it. For instance, authors can submit the research works to top-tier journals in the discipline, and thus enter the salient papers of the readers. However, do such competitive forces tend to correct choice errors caused by reader’s imperfect attention? In this short communication, we study about how the competition between research works for publication may ensure that the best paper is the one having the highest probability to be cited. According to the model, the best papers are the ones published in the journal with the highest citation impact. Therefore, these papers are also the ones that have the highest probability to attract attention and the highest probability of being cited.