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People who are working out their ideas far outside the mainstream have no one to cite but them selves. Some are quacks, to be sure, but sometimes a field is jus
by your-nanny 7y ago
People who are working out their ideas far outside the mainstream have no one to cite but them selves. Some are quacks, to be sure, but sometimes a field is just not ready for their work because the utility of the idea is not easily apparent, or because it's perceived to be too risky. A field needs a healthy mix of the the curmudgeonly stubborn thinkers going their way no matter the cost, and those making steady progress on solvable problems.
- guntars 7y agoDo you have any good examples, historical or otherwise?
- pkaye 7y agoPossibly Barry Marshall and Robin Warren who discovered H Pylori causes peptic ulcers and subsequently won a Nobel Prize. They were ridiculed by doctors and scientists for their theory.
- jacquesm 7y agoI can see them citing themselves once or twice but not 10's of times or more.
- ummonk 7y agoI was going to suggest Peter Turchin as an outsider to history / sociology but he seems to have been able to get published in highly reputable journals http://peterturchin.com/academic-publications/#Articles_in_Nature_Science_and_PNAS http://peterturchin.com/academic-publications/#Articles_in_N...
- ratmice 7y agoBetween the two authors here (McKinsey and Tarski), they cite each other 7 times, with 14 citations, giving 50% outgoing self-citation, however this paper also received incoming citations contemporaneously... https://doi.org/10.2307/2268135 https://doi.org/10.2307/2268135
- your-nanny 7y agopossibly Sutton and Barto's work on reinforcement learning throughout the 80s.
- justinmeiners 7y agoDijkstra rarely cited others and wrote entire books without citations.
- jacquesm 7y agoSure, but there is no 'pruning of the tree' in case a dead end is reached, so the citations stay allowing the quack to pretend they have more credibility than they do. In fact, the whole idea of these citations is to build credibility where there is none.
- duskwuff 7y agoRight. The purpose of citation metrics is to measure the intellectual influence of a person's ideas. If an academic's works are never being cited by anyone else, the correct conclusion would be that their ideas have little influence -- regardless of how many self-citing papers they've published.
- your-nanny 7y agoinfluence is not the same thing as credibility.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- joe_the_user 7y agoThe need to step outside of mainstream views has been important for intellectual progress over the years, indeed. The problem we have now is we're stuck with a series of bad faith, polarizing and disingenuous views that "suck the oxygen out of" actual wide-ranging thinking - IE, climate denialists can still get a lot of money, anti-vaxers can pull in a lot of money from scams, etc.