To ascertain the diffusion and influence of Savolainen's ELIS model and its use as a theoretical and/or methodological basis for research. A context citation analysis was made of the work where this researcher published his model. Analysis covered the year of publication, the type of work and the subject-matter of the citing documents concerned. In-context citations were analysed for their frequency in each citing text, style, location and content cited. The ELIS model received 18.5 cites/year. 20.2% of them corresponded to papers published in journals in other areas, mainly computer science. The average of cites per paper was 1.8; 64.5% of the citing works cited them only once. 60% of the cites were considered essential. Only 13.7% of these cites appear in theory or methods. 37% of the citing documents contained no concept relating to the model. The method used focuses on the most direct context of a cite (sentence or paragraph), but isolates it from the general context (full document, other documents by the author or their social capital). It has however allowed this research issue to be dealt with under laboratory conditions, and revealed nuances hidden by the absolute number of cites. It has become evident that the dissemination and influence of the ELIS model is less that what the total number of cites indicates, and that it has scarcely been incorporated into research design. Despite its popularity, it is not being validated and/or refuted by way of empirical data.