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It's worth noting that citation counts are an increasingly poor metric of paper quality (and always has been). There are multiple works to show that the rise o

It's worth noting that citation counts are an increasingly poor metric of paper quality (and always has been). There are multiple works to show that the rise of search engine like Google Scholar have meant that researchers are increasingly citing the same papers, because their searches are all returning the same thing. Meanwhile, there are some "sleeper" papers that are super relevant to a lot of works, offer great insight, but by virtue of their low search ranking, never get cited. That's not to say there isn't a fair amount of unremarkable research. It's just that it doesn't always correlate with citation count.

umlautae 6y ago
To possibly find “sleeper” papers check out the “show similar” feature of this arXiv mirror on condensed matter physics. https://cond-mat.abbrivia.com https://cond-mat.abbrivia.com Search for some keywords and then surf by “show similar” on relevant articles.
teleforce 6y ago
Thank you, now I know the term to associate with one of our papers written by one of the students, a "sleeper paper". The twist is that Google ranks it consistently high in the very first page in Google search (but not Google Scholar) for well over a year now for two common keywords. Somehow it never get a good citation count mainly a few handful self-citations even it has over 99% classification in all the important metrics namely accuracy, sensitivity and specificity. Curiously I have another co-author paper by another student that was published around the same time (same topic different application) and as of today it has over 60 citations count. It even cited by a Stanford University researcher but only with classification accuracy of below 90%! I think this is a classic case of a sleeper paper where you have excellent results but then nobody want to cite you because it makes their paper look bad or negate their (fake) claim of novelty. FYI, most of the papers in the field use the same venerable open online database that make it easy to compare your results against others.

umlautae 6y ago

To possibly find “sleeper” papers check out the “show similar” feature of this arXiv mirror on condensed matter physics. https://cond-mat.abbrivia.com https://cond-mat.abbrivia.com Search for some keywords and then surf by “show similar” on relevant articles.

teleforce 6y ago

Thank you, now I know the term to associate with one of our papers written by one of the students, a "sleeper paper". The twist is that Google ranks it consistently high in the very first page in Google search (but not Google Scholar) for well over a year now for two common keywords. Somehow it never get a good citation count mainly a few handful self-citations even it has over 99% classification in all the important metrics namely accuracy, sensitivity and specificity. Curiously I have another co-author paper by another student that was published around the same time (same topic different application) and as of today it has over 60 citations count. It even cited by a Stanford University researcher but only with classification accuracy of below 90%! I think this is a classic case of a sleeper paper where you have excellent results but then nobody want to cite you because it makes their paper look bad or negate their (fake) claim of novelty. FYI, most of the papers in the field use the same venerable open online database that make it easy to compare your results against others.