In my last post ( Assessed by Robots and citation Quiz) I argued that our careers are now in the hands of the publishing industry – they provide the numerical metrics and based on this the funders decide whether we keep our jobs. So I thought I’d look at how to improve my citations. I typed something like “most cited papers chemistry” into a well-known search engine and got something like this result. (Now we’ve just been out for our Christmas lunch and now I have got back the results aren’t the same as beforehand – so take everything with a pinch of salt… Anyway in the first cases I went to CAS Spotlight which announces:
CAS, the world’s leader in providing chemical information is now highlighting the most cited documents. The “Chemistry” category identifies the most highly cited chemistry documents appearing in the 1999-2005 published literature and appearing in journals covered by CAS.
CAS provides this information as a free service to the scientific community.
I went to the Journal articles (2005) button and got:
The following records identify the top ten, most cited journal articles appearing in documents published in 2005.
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| Title | Author/Affiliation | Source |
|---|---|---|
| 1. Density-functional thermochemistry. III. The role of exact exchange [details] | Becke, Axel D. Dep. Chem., Queen’s Univ., Kingston, ON, K7L 3N6, Can. |
J. Chem. Phys. |
| 2. Development of the Colle-Salvetti correlation-energy formula into a functional of the electron density [details] | Lee, Chengteh; Yang, Weitao; et al. Dep. Chem., Univ. North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC, 27514, USA |
Phys. Rev. B: Condens. Matter |
| 3. Density-functional exchange-energy approximation with correct asymptotic behavior [details] | Becke, A. D. Dep. Chem., Queen’s Univ., Kingston, ON, K7L 3N6, Can. |
Phys. Rev. A: Gen. Phys. |
| 4. Generalized gradient approximation made simple [details] | Perdew, John P.; Burke, Kieron; et al. Dep. Phys. Quantum Theory Group, Tulane Univ., New Orleans, LA, 70118, USA |
Phys. Rev. Lett. |
| 5. The Protein Data Bank [details] | Berman, Helen M.; Westbrook, John; et al. Research Collaboratory for Structural Bioinformatics (RCSB), Research Collaboratory for Structural Bioinformatics (RCSB), Rutgers University, Piscataway, NJ, 08854-8087, USA |
Nucleic Acids Res. |
| 6. Gaussian basis sets for use in correlated molecular calculations. I. The atoms boron through neon and hydrogen [details] | Dunning, Thom H., Jr. Chem. Div., Argonne Natl. Lab., Argonne, IL, 60439, USA |
J. Chem. Phys. |
| 7. Efficient iterative schemes for ab initio total-energy calculations using a plane-wave basis set [details] | Kresse, G.; Furthmueller, J. Inst. Theor. Phys., Technische Univ. Wien, Vienna, A-1040, Australia |
Phys. Rev. B: Condens. Matter |
| 8. Duplexes of 21-nucleotide RNAs mediate RNA interference in cultured mammalian cells [details] | Elbashir, Sayda M.; Harborth, Jens; et al. Dep. of Cellular Biochem., Max-Planck-Inst. for Biophys. Chem., Gottingen, D-37077, Germany |
Nature (London, U. K.) |
| 9. Ordered mesoporous molecular sieves synthesized by a liquid-crystal template mechanism [details] | Kresge, C. T.; Leonowicz, M. E.; et al. Paulsboro Res. Lab., Mobil Res. and Dev. Corp., Paulsboro, NJ, 08066, USA |
Nature (London) |
| 10. General atomic and molecular electronic structure system [details] | Schmidt, Michael W.; Baldridge, Kim K.; et al. Dep. Chem., Iowa State Univ., Ames, IA, 50011-0311, USA |
J. Comput. Chem. |
Most Cited Journal Articles – ChemistryCAS Science Spotlight
(Note – I am sure this is part of a page that is copyright ACS so I am claiming fair use without asking permission. And I shall be complimentary – so please don’t cut me off). Now… have a look and decide what is common to all of these. Read the abstracts if it helps (I didn’t read the articles as only the abstracts are Openly accessible). That’s what I asked you in the last post.
Yes – they are all about techniques. So my world domination strategy was based on creating things that people want to use, not providing scientific results. (You can ,of course, argue that a database or a basis set or a functional is a scientific result, but the citers are using it as a tool).
I reran the search after lunch. I thought the results would be the same but maybe Google, or the lunch or my fingers were different. At top of the bunch now comes Elsevier:
| Access key papers as recognised by CAS Science Spotlight |  |
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(I didn’t ask their permission to quote this either).
Well I am mystified. There is no correlation between the types of paper given here and the ones earlier. They are not only not the same papers, but they aren’t even on similar topics.
I have probably made a simple mistake. (I think it’s the same CAS Spotlight and the same year. Elsevier uses slightly different words “most requested chemistry papers in 2005*” (my italics) and also “ MOST REQUESTED CHEMISTRY AND RELATED SCIENCE’ PAPER ON CAS “. So maybe there are two completely different lists. Or maybe there is a different selection criterion. Or a subset.
But imagine you are a busy provost/dean and have to decide whether to close the theoretical section of you chemistry department or the organic (of course you may be thinking of both…). The theoreticians will point to the CAS page, the synthetists to the Elsevier page. And I am sure there are others.
So the real skill in the next decade will not be doing science, but choosing and manipulating the metrics. I suppose it is an advance from HEFCE’s last idea which was to measure research income.
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(0)Someone (Rich) posted a comment about a Chemistry World article on citations. It’s been deleted by mistake – please repost it.
It went into the spam bucket I get about 50-100 spams per day and Akismet puts them in a spam bucket. It’s very good – false positives run at > 99%. If your post is very short and contains a link it may get seen as spam and that’s what happened. I trawl very rapidly through the spam and noticed this, despammed it, but then deleted by mistake.
In general comments should probably be at least one full line to avoid the spam detector – slightly longer if they have a link. Spam is a rapidly exploding menace – I don’t see much of a solution.