Regrettable that the article begins by outing a prof from an unheard of university in India, who probably publishes in low repute journals and conference. Ideally the citing malfeasance score should be weighted based on journal and conference reputation.
Hundreds of extreme self-citing scientists revealed in new database
101–110 of 215 posts
Re: Hundreds of extreme self-citing scientists revealed in new database
#102Earlier quoted context omitted.
Most scientists work on topics that are quite niche. Most of those topics lead to nothing. A lot of good research took years to ripen enough to be of actual value. A lot of popular topics started out in a niche. Most of mathematics took dozens of years to fully come to fruitition. Can you decide beforehand which one will be the next big thing? Today, most scientists go for the popular topics and whatever is on the go…
So to answer the question, you are so brilliant no one else has stumbled on this question
No, the answer is that there is a limited number of scientists and a limitless number of research directions. This doesn't have to be correlated with brilliance.
In fact, it can be easier to research some of the less popular paths because there is less competition and more low-hanging fruits.
Re: Hundreds of extreme self-citing scientists revealed in new database
#103The core problem here is that universities think that citation statistics are a useful metric to evaluate the quality of the work of a scientist. There's plenty of evidence that this is not the case or that even the reverse may be the case [1], but this idea refuses to die. [1]
I am pretty sure self citation is required to be listed separately. I mean, even the eb1 visa application required that.
Re: Hundreds of extreme self-citing scientists revealed in new database
#104Earlier quoted context omitted.
PageRank might be better way to evaluate quality. It too can be gamed. Maybe not as easily, though.
Aka eigenfactor
My understanding is that eigenfactor rates journals, not individual papers, so if somehow you get low-quality (whatever you want that to mean) papers into nature it has no independent way to realize that your specific paper is low quality. Also eigenfactor is biased towards favoring larger journals, which is not obviously a good thing. It would honestly be really cool if someone did page rank for individual papers. It seems like a much saner metric than anything that is currently used.
Re: Hundreds of extreme self-citing scientists revealed in new database
#105As someone who now works in astronomy, I'm not at all surprised at the high self-citation rate for the field. It is true that a lot of papers are published by large consortiums. For example, at LSST (where I work), if you have been working on the project for 2 years, you are considered a "builder" and added as an author to all major project wide papers. Those papers, which tend to be long and full of great stuff, are…
> I wonder how many of these papers are where the first author has cited other papers where they are the first author. Also, it's worth mentioning that countries which support PhD via publication essentially require you to conduct self-citing research. This is to show you've had a common thread between your research, and that the PhD can be defended as to have all the papers be considered to be on the same subject.
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Re: Hundreds of extreme self-citing scientists revealed in new database
#106Self-citation is appropriate for a new paper that builds on the results of a previous paper. But in evaluating how influential a researcher is, it makes sense to exclude self-citation, while being careful to avoid any implication that self-citation is wrong.
Re: Hundreds of extreme self-citing scientists revealed in new database
#107Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why not simply use replication as a measure? Have your studies been replicated? How many other studies have you replicated? Would both help solve the replication crisis, and resolve this problem. Of course then you might have 10 000 studies replicating the same easy to do study... which is why the "score" should be reduced based on how many other times that study has been replicated.
The issue is how many researchers want to spend their time replicating the research of other people rather than doing their own original work. Getting funding is already incredibly hard, plus no-one is going to give you tenure or promote you for replicating the work of others.
In academic situations yeah, but in industry? You can make money replicating other people’s work.
Re: Hundreds of extreme self-citing scientists revealed in new database
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
Two economists are walking down the street. One sees a $20 bill and starts to bend over to pick it up. The other economist says "Don't bother - if it were really worth $20, someone else would have picked it up." There's countless numbers of scientists that made great strides working on topics others deemed rediculous. Heck, many of the Nobel prize winners were ridiculed by their colleagues as borderline wack-jobs at…
> Heck, many of the Nobel prize winners were ridiculed by their colleagues as borderline wack-jobs at the time they were working on their research. Even after winning the prize, some still were with their later work (Crick's search for consciousness comes to mind, and why it would be so worthless a search does not). Do you have any good examples of being considered wack-jobs before their winning?
Bill Beaty's list of Ridiculed science mavericks vindicated has dozens, most with the story in a nutshell + links.
Re: Hundreds of extreme self-citing scientists revealed in new database
#109Perhaps it would be useful for reviewers to point out which citations do not contribute to the paper? It really is a tough problem. If someone is toiling along in some niche they have carved out, they and their colleagues may be the only one working in that space. That leads to a lot of cross citation and self citation. That said, if you publish paper A, and then cite it in paper B which builds on that work, then in…
As a reader I personally prefer if they do a more complete set of citations, instead of making me follow up a multi-step chain to dig them up, as if I'm a compiler resolving transitive dependencies. I like little history-map sentences like: "This technique was introduced by Foo (1988) and recast in the modern computational formalism by Bar (2009); the present work uses an optimized variant (Bar 2012)."
You could just cite the last paper here, which is the only one used directly, and which presumably itself cites the earlier papers. But it's more useful to me if you include the version of the sentence that cites all three and briefly explains their relationship.
Re: Hundreds of extreme self-citing scientists revealed in new database
#110People 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 prog…
Do you have any good examples, historical or otherwise?
Dijkstra rarely cited others and wrote entire books without citations.