7 ms·
Are 90% of academic papers never cited?
- pfdietz 3y agoMy citation rate was much higher than 10%.
- gus_massa 3y ago(Just to clarify, I like the article, but it's a very weird myth.) > It is widely accepted that academic papers are rarely cited or even read. I never heard that. The article gives a good explanation of why the answer is "no", but for me it's quite clear. Most research groups continue a line of research and cite the previous papers, so they get at least one or two self cites. Also, many groups cite each other, to show that other people care about a similar topic, an perhaps it can be clasified as an unoficial tit-for-tat, so I guess one or two additional cites are common. As the article explain (IIUC) the problemis that they are counting very recent papers that still have no cites. If a paper is published today, other research group may read it and take like 3 month to extend it and another 3 month to publish the new paper. So unsurprisingly papers in the last 6 months have no citations. In a 5 years window, it's like 1/10. If you need to do the experiments in mice or humans, the time increase, so it may explain why biology and medicine have worse numbers. And there are horror stories in math about reviews that lasted more than a year. So I'm surprise that math doesn't have the worse results.