{"id":386,"date":"2020-06-23T18:00:21","date_gmt":"2020-06-23T22:00:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ajeziorski.ca\/podcast\/?p=386"},"modified":"2022-07-26T23:16:24","modified_gmt":"2022-07-27T03:16:24","slug":"14-ex-citation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ajeziorski.ca\/podcast\/14-ex-citation\/","title":{"rendered":"14: Ex-citation"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

“Unscrupulous writers often count on the fact that most people don’t bother reading footnotes or tracking down citations” – Daniel Levitin<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Today on Core Ideas, we continue to explore the spread of Contagious Ideas<\/a> with a look at influential scientific articles. We ignore all the problems associated with distilling nebulous concepts into a single metric, and do it anyway, asking, \u201dWhat does \u2018highly cited\u2019 mean within paleolimnology?\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The ultimate purpose of publishing scientific papers<\/a> is to share new knowledge, so it can be read and learnt from. However, with no way to measure how often something is read, it is difficult to quantify whether a particular paper is significant or influential. The number of times a paper is \u201ccited\u201d<\/a> (referred to as a source in other papers) is often used as a metric to compare papers. There are many caveats associated with reducing a broad concept into a single number, and it is unclear whether citation impact<\/a> is actually a good way to measure influence; nevertheless \u201cif all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.\u201d<\/a> <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Wikipedian Protestor from xkcd<\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

For a sense of what it means to be \u201chighly cited\u201d, our scale needed to be calibrated. A 2014 analysis<\/a> of the Web of Science database<\/a>, revealed the highly skewed distribution of citations, with most papers cited just once, or not at all, while the highest cited paper (Lowry et al. 1951)<\/a> had over 300K citations. For a more recent citation value, we checked Google Scholar<\/a> only to find that Lowry et al. 1951 has a mere 222,572 citations in that database. This is a real issue when comparing citation numbers, as it involves databases of databases with incomplete overlap. Raising the question, is it even possible to determine a true number?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Another concern with citations is variability among fields, as the number of researchers and average publication record vary wildly across disciplines. So we checked some famous scientists and scientific works:<\/p>\n\n\n\n