Thursday, September 23, 2010

what wrong with citing a paper?

Hadas Shema, an Information Science PhD student, discusses some of the politics and problems with academic citations in The citation game. She got her facts from Bornmann, L., & Daniel, H. (2008). What do citation counts measure? A review of studies on citing behavior Journal of Documentation, 64 (1).

This one jumped out at me:

Journal-dependent factors: Getting published in a high-factor journal doesn't necessarily mean your paper is the best thing since sliced bread, but it means more people are likely to think so. Also, the first paper in a journal usually gets cited more often (I wonder if that's still relevant, given how wide-spread electronic access is these days) (emphasis added).

Lot's of crap has been published in major journals. And the corollary deserves to be mentioned: lots of good article ar published in minor journals and fail to get the respect or notice they deserve.

2 comments:

Hadas Shema said...

Well, I'm a 'she' (Hadas is a female Israeli name) but I appreciate you mentioning my post all the same:) Thank you!

Chris said...

doh! sorry.

TV Linguistics - Pronouncify.com and the fictional Princeton Linguistics department

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