“Correlated with an institutional or ideological structure”

Suppose you discover that:

• a certain interpretation repeatedly receives funding,
• competing interpretations repeatedly lose funding,
• university curricula repeatedly favor one interpretation,
• publishers repeatedly reject the alternative,
• and these patterns occur across many institutions.

If these patterns consistently correspond with a particular ideological or institutional structure, you may have evidence that the structure is related to the scholarly outcome.

That is much stronger than simply saying:

“Scholar X wasn't cited.”

Then you have evidence about how the scholarly system operates, rather than merely about one scholar's citation count.