Can embodied Cultural Capital affect citation impact?

In Cultural Capital Theory, embodied cultural capital refers to the habitus that is developed from educational environment. Habitus and education have been proved to affect economic activity, political participation, as well as students' academic achievements. The environment where a scientist pursues higher education helps to build scientific habitus. Less is known, however, about the effect of education and habitus on scientific impact. The present study focuses on the relationship between educational background of scientists and their citation impact. Educational backgrounds are measured by disciplinary background, academic degree, and alma mater rank, while citation impact is crassly operationalized as citation counts. Article samples are collected from leading library and information science (LIS) journals. Two negative binomial regression models are run: the first model incorporates six control variables, while the second includes both control and independent variables. When educational background is added to the second model, pseudo R2 rises from 0.0545 to 0.0813, indicating that the educational background of authors exerts an impact on citations. We find that significant relationships exist between disciplinary background, academic degree and citation counts, while higher alma mater rank could not affect a scientist's future citation impact