This is the simulation code of all models in the paper "A simulation-based analysis of the impact of rhetorical citations in science." Authors: Honglin Bao (Harvard Business School hbao@hbs.edu) and Misha Teplitskiy (University of Michigan Ann Arbor, tepl@umich.edu). GitHub repo: https://github.com/Honglin-Bao/rhetorical_citing An earlier version of the paper is available here: https://arxiv.org/abs/2304.06190 Paper: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-023-44249-0 We have implemented 6 models: The full model with heterogeneous readers (base model, model 1.1) The null model with heterogeneous readers, threshold-fixed (model 1.2) The null model with heterogeneous readers, citing-budget-fixed (model 1.3) The full model with homogeneous readers (model 2.1) The null model with homogeneous readers, threshold-fixed (model 2.2) The null model with homogeneous readers, citing-budget-fixed (model 2.3) In this repository, we provided a comprehensively detailed commentary on the base model (model 1.1). For the other five models which are derived from the base model, we highlight the distinctions that differentiate them from model 1.1.