Sorry, folks -I'm a busy post-doc that has to write papers, not emails :)
If one finds a paper relevant one quotes it in several papers he/she writes
(if he/she happens to write papers, that is...). If one wants to criticize a
paper one will quote it once or twice (to criticize it), but it's unlikely
that one will be quoting it many times as basically there will be more
interesting things to read and to quote. One can also omit the citation to
it, that's a matter of personal style.
Citation counts are relevant cumulatively, i.e. if through your career your
papers get quoted a lot, then there's a very good change you're doing
relevant work. If, on the other hand, your papers never get quoted (or you
don't happen to write papers at all), then your contribution to knowledge is
probably negligible.
Basically, the idea is that there are little chances that one will write an
irrelevant paper which gets highly cited, because people won't bother with
it. This may happen, nevertheless, and that's the risk that we have to face.
The trouble with this is that the judgment is slow and, more importantly,
escapes the control of single individuals. The wider research community will
decide if one's work is relevant or not, and no single individual can take
that decision.
Of course, not everybody is comfortable with that, but we scientists tend to
remember fables of foxes who cannot reach the grapes... because they are a
bit sour!
All the best,
Rui
> -----Original Message-----
> From: [log in to unmask] [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On
> Behalf Of Tom Carden
> Sent: 31 October 2005 17:28
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: [SPACESYNTAX] citation counts (was Re: Publically available
standard
> test cases)
>
> > Rui Carvalho wrote:
> >
> >> But keep in mind that citation counts are the closest we academics have
> >> to a
> >> democratic system ;)
> >
>
> What does one do if one wishes to be critical of a particular methodology
> without 'voting' for it? Omit the citation?
>
> Unless paper citation counts have an equivalent to the rel="nofollow"
> attribute for HTML links*, people who judge quality by citation count will
> not be getting the whole story, surely?
>
> Tom.
>
> * http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2005/01/preventing-comment-spam.html -
> Google's solution to "comment spam" and a method to allow web page owners
> to link to things without implicitly endorsing them (arguably a flaw in
> Google's PageRank algorithm, but they're in charge of writing the web as
> much as reading it nowadays so this is their solution).
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