Do the author's name and/or affiliation affect the visibility of a paper? Suppose two papers were published by fledgling researchers, perhaps PhD students, who are yet unknown in their field. One is Asian, has a surname which is long and difficult to pronounce, and perhaps also comes from a relatively unknown university. The other has an English name, and comes from a well-known university. But otherwise, the two papers are similar in content and on par in terms of quality. 

Ideally, there should not be any preference with regards to citing either of the two papers. That means, in the long run, the expected citation counts of the two papers should be about the same. However, I am interested to know whether this is the case in reality. From my limited experience, I seem to have seen papers that referenced only other papers whose authors are European. Has there been any study that suggests whether the name and/or affiliation of an author affect the visibility and hence the citation count of his/her paper? I am aware that the answer might be different for different fields.



To ask the question in another way, is our perception of a paper influenced by the authors' names and/or affiliations? Do we not tend to infer the quality of a paper by these factors?
The short answer (from the view of an economist) is: Probably not. At least not in the way you suggest.

However, for most (i.e., not the most influential papers/journals) papers most of the citations (especially for PhD students) are "generated" by feedback from conferences, referees, supervisors, ... .
Therefore, someone from Europe is more likely to encounter someone who knows the European paper and therefore only cites the paper from Europe. In addition, researchers from well-known universities have more visibility and are more likely to know the topic of papers from PhD students at their department.

So, even if there is is no discrimination with regards to the name and the affiliation we could observe the effect you described.

I do not know of any study covering your question, and I do not think there is a way to do such a study.




  To ask the question in another way, is our perception of a paper
  influenced by the authors' names and/or affiliations? Do we not tend
  to infer the quality of a paper by these factors?


I guess that depends on the person. I (and most people I know) are heavily influenced by the journal it is published in, not at all by the authors' name (to clarify: We are influenced by the fact if we know the person or not, but not by how the origin of the name / how the name looks like.) and maybe a little bit by the affiliation of the author if it is a top 5 or top 10 institution in the specific field of research.