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The science that’s never been cited
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 9y agoI wonder if part of the reason for uncited papers being so low is that authors cite their own papers in subsequent papers. For example, an author is studying field X, and publishes papers. No one cites the first paper. The author then writes a new paper on X, but cites the first paper. Thus, although no one but the author cited the papers that the author wrote, all but the last one have citations in other papers. Another way this works is that authors in the same department may cite each other's papers especially if the fields are somewhat related. I wonder what the data would look like if they excluded citations by the authors of the original paper.
- yesenadam 9y agoExactemente. It's fairly bizarre that this article didn't mention self-citation, huh.
- lokimedes 9y agoI sure hope that the study corrects for self-citations. It’s a pretty simple procedure with Web of Science. That said, who you cite can be a fairly political decision, it’s like who to follow on Twitter, at least in fields with multiple people working on the same topic.
- azernik 9y agoIt explicitly does mention self-citation.
- yesenadam 9y agoThanks. I looked again. Are you referring to that one graph? I couldn't find any mention in the text.
- greeneggs 9y agoIn the methods section, they do say that "first author self-citations were excluded." One of the figures in the Nature article also pulls out self-citations. https://arxiv.org/abs/0809.5250 https://arxiv.org/abs/0809.5250
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 9y agoDo note however that many times the first author is not the principal investigator (ie the person that has the funding for the study and is often tenure track faculty) but is often a graduate student or a post-doc. The principal investigator may be in the middle or even at the end of the author list. Thus just excluding first author self-citations is probably inadequate. The chances are high that a grad student or post-doc is going to cite their adviser's previous papers.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- azag0 9y agoThe rule to read the author list, simplified: first author did the work. Last author funded the research. Everyone else contributed somewhat.
- thomasfedb 9y agoOne metric used to evaluate publication history is the combined count of first and last authorships for this very reason.
- njarboe 9y agoIt is also traditional that the first author, in addition to doing the most of the scientific work, takes on most of the writing He/She also edits together the various other authors contributions.
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- yesenadam 9y agoI was looking into a CS academic who claimed to be widely cited. Mostly it was self-citation, in his own papers. He seemed to be the editor of a journal which published a lot of his own papers citing himself. I couldn't help thinking of that looking at the graph of decreasing uncited papers.
- Cyph0n 9y agoIf he actually has a journal and does that, he's nothing more than a con artist.
- yesenadam 9y agoHehe yes, that's the general conclusion. I'm not sure if I should name names. (Ah well) The guy I'm talking about is Azlan Iqbal, a Malaysian CS professor. I know him as the writer of numerous wacky articles on ChessBase (leading chess news site) about his chess+computer studies. People criticize his shoddy work in the comments, and he says, nay, jeers they're not qualified to judge because they didn't read his uni thesis, dont know CS, dont understand his algorithm, etc. Kind of amazing. I guess he can't be an impostor in CS, but most of his published articles are about computers + chess, with the Dunning-Kruger effect in full flight. I guess you have to know a bit about chess to fully realize how inept his stuff is. But just the embarrassing way he attacks all critics in the comments is remarkable. Although the CB readers largely ignore him now. See the stories with most comments to see what I mean. [0] Are there a lot of people like this? Or worse? [0] https://en.chessbase.com/author/azlan-iqbal https://en.chessbase.com/author/azlan-iqbal
- Cyph0n 9y ago> Are there a lot of people like this? Or worse? This guy is something else... I have honestly never seen anything like this before. Most of his journal papers [1] are not even close to standard journal paper quality. His latest one, titled "A Simple Encryption Method for FTP Passwords", is a two-page document showing how to use a substitution cipher to encrypt FTP passwords... That wouldn't even pass off as a project for an undergrad CS course! The second journal paper seems acceptable, but I am also not familiar with chess algorithms, so I cannot provide a definite opinion. Some amazing quotes from [2]: "Let me begin by saying that the aesthetics model in chess that I developed for my Ph.D. is considered a seminal piece of work in then uncharted waters." "While I have written many papers, to the extent memory serves, I do not self-publish at all even though admittedly, some of my publications are certainly better or more prestigious than others (like any academic)." (note: you should never self-publish, so there really is no need to "consult" your memory) "In fact, I am quite confident I could last at least 20 moves even against Magnus Carlsen under tournament conditions." "[...] I simply do not need to be a chess master as there are many official chess masters only too happy to assist and work with me on projects. I am frankly quite amazed at how open-minded and forward-thinking some of them are." [1] http://metalab.uniten.edu.my/%7Eazlan/ http://metalab.uniten.edu.my/%7Eazlan/ [2]: https://en.chessbase.com/post/women-and-beautiful-chess-a-response-to-critics https://en.chessbase.com/post/women-and-beautiful-chess-a-re...
- olympus 9y ago10% of papers being completely uncited is a little misleading. There is a long tail of papers with 1 or 2 citations that were hardly read beyond the abstract and only cited to up a paper's number of references and had a few good keywords. That research is effectively uncited. The reason for this isn't really surprising: Most research isn't that groundbreaking. Most research is done because if you don't produce a paper every now and then or else the university will fire you. So you crank out that study you did on the insulating properties of the grey squirrel's tail vs the red squirrel's tail and you keep your job, although nobody gives a crap about how warm a squirrel's tail is.
- mehrdadn 9y agoTo be honest, now that you mentioned this, I'm really curious how warm a squirrel's tail is.
- ct0 9y agoSeriously, you should write a paper on it when you learn
- Cyph0n 9y agoNot my field, but this[1] is kind of related. It looks at a certain type of squirrel native to southern Africa that uses its tail as a parasol to provide shade. [1]: http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/physzool.57.1.30155968 http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/physzool.57...
- grkvlt 9y agoMe too. I discovered this paper: "Feeling the heat: Ground squirrels heat their tails to discourage rattlesnake attack" [0] which seems interesting and sort of relevant. It also turns out to have been cited only once so far. [1] 0. http://www.pnas.org/content/104/36/14177 http://www.pnas.org/content/104/36/14177 1. http://www.pnas.org/cgi/crossref-forward-links/104/36/14177 http://www.pnas.org/cgi/crossref-forward-links/104/36/14177
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- esfandia 9y agoIt seems to me, based to some extent on my own experience, that a paper has a harder time getting cited when it's a bit off the beaten track (and might in fact be more original, trail-blazing and interesting), because by definition it's a bit lonely in its field. Conversely, when the work is fairly derivative it gets lumped in with others and is easier to cite as part of the related work section of another paper, even if its influence is minimal.
- thomasfedb 9y agoSome papers are also just very useful as citations. My least interesting paper is my most cited for this very reason.
- jrochkind1 9y ago> “Lack of citation cannot be interpreted as meaning articles are useless or valueless,” says David Pendlebury, a senior citations analyst at Clarivate. On the other hand, presence of citation can not be interpreted as meaning articles are useful or valuable. For one, there could be chains of useless and valueless papers citing each other.
- codeisawesome 9y agoStriking similarity to PageRank and Link Farms.
- qznc 9y agoPageRank was initially invented for scientific publications and later applied to web sites.
- codeisawesome 9y agoWow, that’s amazing to know - thanks for sharing!!
- unpythonic 9y ago> Then, checking on Google Scholar, Heneberg saw that many of the remaining papers actually had been referenced by other works indexed in the Web of Science, but had been missed because of data-entry errors or typos in the papers I wonder if you could look at the number of citations to non-existent papers to find these typos. If you collected such a set, you could do a loose search against the list of published papers, and see how many are a close match. For instance, a typo in an author's name or the paper's title could be ignored while matching the journal, date and page could give the auditors a list of best guesses for this missed citations.
- ChuckMcM 9y agoI like how the 3dB point for engineering papers is 4 years (that is where 50% of the papers remain uncited). I am a bit surprised it goes down from there. I have always felt that a big chunk of the engineering or technical papers out there reference technology that is obsolete after 5 years[1]. There are the seminal papers of course, the ones that it seems are always cited, but a huge chunk which were useful when published, are much less so later. [1] No I don't have a citation :-) but having written a few papers and looking for related work I found the chance of finding something relevant dropped precipitously when you got into papers that were more than a few years old.
- analog31 9y agoI wonder if citation research could become self sustaining, if it generates enough cited papers.