What specifically do the authors mean when they—as we saw in the epigraph—call the UFO silence in international relations a taboo? They suggest that instead of merely not appearing in research, there is instead an “authoritative disregard of UFOs” that includes “active denial of their object status” through decrying UFOlogy as pseudoscience, active dismissal of public UFO claims, and maintaining intense secrecy around official UFO research and reports…

My suggestion at this juncture is that the UFO taboo is what IR theorists make of it. This was not a necessary outcome of the citational ecosystem that developed around “Sovereignty and the UFO,” as we could have imagined multiple ways in which scholars might have engaged with the piece—true ignorance, skeptic debunking, or UFOlogical engagement.

Scholarly taboos are not fixed and necessary imperatives in the prestige economy of academic publishing, but are instead socially constructed phenomena that are continually (re)produced through the strategies of association that scholars employ in their citation and non-citation of texts.

The UFO taboo example, then, is not only a case that helps us to understand the status of extraterrestrials in challenging the anthropocentrism of sovereignty, but also many other norms in scholarly discourse that are reproduced through citational practice.

Rather than merely a structural category, taboos in scholarly discourse are also mediated by the intersubjective creation of meaning—just as the interaction of states could have created institutions other than self-help, other strategies of scholarly engagement with “Sovereignty and the UFO” might have broadened or undone the UFO taboo instead of the narrowing that we have witnessed.

This recognition of scholarly agency in the construction of meaning is important because it reveals how interpretive scientometrics might be put to work in broader contexts within the field.