All the different ways and reasons your papers get cited in the scientific literature
29 Feb 2020
I found this research paper on evolution very inspiring. In a way.
The well known scientific proverb says:
Don’t judge a book by its cover. Judge it by how often it’s cited!
Citing has become one of the most critical determinants of the quality of scientific pursuit. Originally citation metrics, a sub-field of bibliometrics, was applied to scientific magazines and was supposed to help librarians decide whether a given journal is worth subscribing to or not. But I will not write about this issue today! Of course, publishing houses circumvented this problem, for example, by selling subscriptions in bundles of several titles, where some are important in their field, and others are instead just recycling paper covered in paint. These days citometry has also affected individual researchers.
It has become important how often we release papers, as it is said in scientific jargon for getting published. And how often other researchers cite these papers. Such an approach has its advantages, and it also has severe drawbacks, and ways of hacking this system have been developed. But today it is not about that either!
In such a system, these citations count as points. Just like credits for taking classes by undergrad students. When cited, you get one point added to, e.g. your Hirsch index. In some countries, e.g. my homeland, Poland, it’s crucial for one’s career progress! But are all citations equal, like souls are equal in the eyes of the Creator? I distinguish several ways to be cited:
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The ” founder effect” citation - you’ve discovered a previously unknown phenomenon of nature or the human mind. This discovery became the foundation of the citing party’s research. She devoted half of the introduction to discussing your results. Later she presents her findings in a critical comparison with yours. Kudos! But you get only one point to your Hirsch index.
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“The method (wo)man” - you’ve come up with a new and better approach to the problem. The citing party uses your research method all the way in their work — still one point.
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The “I need that number” citation - your paper provided a fine detail to the citing party work, e.g. she estimated how many insects are there in the world. And you happened to calculate all the flies sometime before. All of them. All.
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The “it’s fresh stuff” citation - the citing party wants to show that he is in the avant-garde of research in his field, not an intellectual hermit. So he must first quote a couple of fairly recent papers that approached a similar topic. If you have published a paper in the last three years and its title in 30% consists of keywords relevant to the author, you can be sure that your article will be cited. Not necessarily read, though.
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The “I also wear shoes” citation - the author wants to show that her research method is not chosen because the cosmic super-consciousness directly transmitted it to her brain, but because it is a widely accepted standard in her field. And you just published something relatively recently and used the same methods. Yup, a citation is coming! For example, We’ve used laboratory mice to study how mice choose cheese, which is the standard in mice research (Felis et al., 2019). I also have the impression that being named something easy to remember, like “John Smith” rather than, for example, “Aditya Govindamadipurusham” helps here a bit.
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The “vacuum cleaner” citation - the citing party must demonstrate that he has read all the relevant literature on the subject, e.g. to his PhD advertiser. So he sucks up everything Google Scholar suggests to him. It is enough that the title of your paper has at least two keywords relevant to the citing party.
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Cited by mistake - some well-known physicist has the same surname as you, and the citation managing software suggested the wrong paper (yup, I know a case where a friend was cited by mistake in an unrelated field of research).
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The ” sorry, but NO!” citation - the citing party was researching the same stuff but some time later. And he found you made a mistake. But you were the first one who got published! So it is he who has to exercise his writing skills to avoid saying that you can’t do science! But the points are still counting.
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The “CitePal” system - the citing party is a good pal of yours. You’re citing each other’s work and some other amigos you work with. Just like that, regardless of the relevance of cited work. It’s called a citation farm and it’s a foul play. But don’t worry. Universities in many countries still don’t show a red card for that.
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Anti-citation - you have been exposed as a fraud. In the scientific press, they write that your publication is fake data, hooliganism and plagiarism. Have you considered filing a lawsuit?
I published the first version of this piece in Polish in now discontinued blog series run by “Obywatele Nauki”.