The science that’s never been cited
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The science that’s never been cited
1–10 of 48 posts
Re: The science that’s never been cited
#2I 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.
Re: The science that’s never been cited
#3I 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.
Re: The science that’s never been cited
#4I 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. Ano…
Exactemente. It's fairly bizarre that this article didn't mention self-citation, huh.
Re: The science that’s never been cited
#5I 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. Ano…
Exactemente. It's fairly bizarre that this article didn't mention self-citation, huh.
I 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.
Re: The science that’s never been cited
#6I 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. Ano…
In 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.
Re: The science that’s never been cited
#7I 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. Ano…
In 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
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Re: The science that’s never been cited
#8I 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. Ano…
In 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
Do 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.
Re: The science that’s never been cited
#910% 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.
Re: The science that’s never been cited
#10It 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.