Category: Citations

A better way to rank the scientific literature

Feeling like your scientific papers aren’t getting the attention they deserve? Wanna bump up your citations counts for the next decade? Then, consider dying young. It apparently helps: a posthumous spike in recognition arises owing to the promotional efforts of colleagues.

This morbid example is but one of many arguments that citations in the scientific literature are not a true meritocracy. Another example: last month I hypothesised that many papers are cited only because they’re new, not because their content is new. It makes me think there’s a better way to rank references.

Scorning citation metrics is a favourite pastime of scientists (up there with scorning p values). Distilling a study’s quality to a single value is simplistic is the standard argument. But what if we double down? What if we focus more on numbers when it comes to citations?

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The half-life of citations

Why are the references in your research so old? That’s feedback I remember receiving on my first bit of true research, my honours dissertation. The examiner wasn’t as blunt as my paraphrasing, but the gist of his comment was memorable enough. At the time, it seemed an odd comment. I now realise that it’s a valid concern.

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Article titles are more important than your name

A webpage or CV with a list of publications serves two purposes. A useful one: to help readers discover papers related to one that interested them. And a less altruistic one: to say ‘Hey, look at how many publications I have’. These days, the latter is somewhat necessary, but shouldn’t overshadow the former. Furthermore, discovering related papers should be an easy task, but too often isn’t.

Too many publication lists that I come across these days obscure the title—surely the most important part of the citation—by bracketing it with the authors’ names and journal details. While this form is necessary for a reference list in a paper, it makes no sense in a CV or personal webpage.

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