Thankyou Tassos, Kay and others for the congratulations. Maybe I should 
put it in perspective:

Most of the people citing SHELX were small molecule crystallographers,
who do not feel obliged to cite the programs they used only in the 
supplementary material.

If you want to be cited you have to write the paper! I had been putting 
off writing this paper for the last 30 years until several Acta Editors 
succeeded in twisting my arm so hard that I wrote it. Speaking as a hobby 
programmer, it is much more fun to write programs than papers.

Fortunately the small molecule community are also helping to increase 
the impact factor of Acta Crystallographica Section D for 2010. The paper 
"Structure validation in chemical crystallography", 65 (2009) 148-155 by 
Ton Spek has already been cited 1751 times and is currently at position 
12 in http://www.info.scopus.com/topcited/ (it is a standard reference
for Ton's CIFCHECK program that is almost universally used for checking 
small molecule refinements before deposition).

George

Prof. George M. Sheldrick FRS
Dept. Structural Chemistry,
University of Goettingen,
Tammannstr. 4,
D37077 Goettingen, Germany
Tel. +49-551-39-3021 or -3068
Fax. +49-551-39-22582


On Wed, 23 Jun 2010, Kay Diederichs wrote:

> Dear Tassos,
> 
> thanks for alerting us to this unexpected but welcome fact!
> I would like to take the opportunity to
> 
> a) congratulate George Sheldrick!
> 
> b) point out to the CCP4 community that we decide ourselves about the
> impact factors of journals that are important for our work:
> specifically, if we would cite Acta Cryst (and JAC) papers in our own
> articles, then this is what will raise (or rather, keep up) the impact
> factor of Acta Cryst in the next years. In other words, please _do_ cite
> the individual programs (separately!) that you use to solve and refine
> your structure, as suggested under "Referencing CCP4 etc" at
> http://www.ccp4.ac.uk/about.php . And cite these papers in the main
> article, not only in the "supporting material" (I surely will need to
> revise my own citing behaviour).
> Ultimately, those of us publishing in Acta Cryst and related journals
> will benefit from this, too. (whether it will suffice for tenure for
> methods-related work is still an open question)
> 
> c) point out that it is of little use to researchers if a review is
> cited instead of their original work.
> 
> thanks,
> 
> Kay
> 
> Anastassis Perrakis schrieb:
> > Dear all,
> > 
> > We are all used to the tyranny of impact factors: high impact
> > publication in "well esteemed" journals, as dictated by the Supreme
> > Authority - excuse me, I meant  Thomson Reuters - often substitutes the
> > judgement of interview panels, grant review panels and sometimes is a
> > decision-maker for lazy referees. A 'high impact' publication in your CV
> > often counts as much as consistent work done for years and is considered
> > the gateway for good jobs and careers. And, alas, your Acta Cryst
> > papers, would not count ...
> > 
> > Since yesterday though, a single person, no other than the ccp4bb
> > bulletin board subscriber and contributor, and an emblematic figure of
> > our community, George Sheldrick, has managed with one action to showcase
> > the flaws of this system. Since yesterday, officially, the top ranking
> > journal according to the official Thomson Reuters Impact factor is: Acta
> > Crystallographica Part A. How was that made possible? Simply by
> > publishing a 'short history about SHELX' and requesting users to cite
> > it. It took two years, but now Acta A has displaced Cell, Nature,
> > Science and even New England Journal of Medicine from the top ranks.
> > 
> > Well, good luck to all the methods-folk who are up for tenure, here is
> > your chance guys and girls ... it will not last long!!!
> > 
> > Best regards,
> > 
> > Tassos
> > 
> > Specifically, the publication with second highest impact factor in the
> > "science" category is/Acta Crystallographica - Section A/, knocking none
> > other than the/New England Journal of Medicine/from the runner's up
> > position. This title's impact factor rocketed up to 49.926 this year,
> > more than 20-fold higher than last year. A single article published in a
> > 2008 issue of the journal seems to be responsible for the meteoric rise
> > in the/Acta Crystallographica - Section A/'s impact factor."A short
> > history of SHELX,"
> > <http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/119398457/abstract>by
> > University of Göttingen crystallographerGeorge Sheldrick,
> > <http://shelx.uni-ac.gwdg.de/%3Csub%3Egsheldr/>which reviewed the
> > development of the computer system SHELX, has been cited more than 6,600
> > times, according to ISI. This paper includes a sentence that essentially
> > instructs readers to cite the paper they're reading -- "This paper could
> > serve as a general literature citation when one or more of the
> > open-source SHELX programs (and the Bruker AXS version SHELXTL) are
> > employed in the course of a crystal-structure determination." (Note:
> > This may be a good way to boost your citations.)
> 
> 
> -- 
> Kay Diederichs                http://strucbio.biologie.uni-konstanz.de
> email: [log in to unmask]    Tel +49 7531 88 4049 Fax 3183
> Fachbereich Biologie, Universität Konstanz, Box M647, D-78457 Konstanz
> 
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>