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The Science That's Never Been Cited (nature.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Nature: One widely repeated estimate, reported in a controversial article in Science in 1990, suggests that more than half of all academic articles remain uncited five years after their publication. Scientists genuinely fret about this issue, says Jevin West, an information scientist at the University of Washington in Seattle who studies large-scale patterns in research literature. After all, citations are widely recognized as a standard measure of academic influence: a marker that work not only has been read, but also has proved useful to later studies. Researchers worry that high rates of uncitedness point to a heap of useless or irrelevant research. In reality, uncited research isn't always useless. What's more, there isn't really that much of it, says Vincent Lariviere, an information scientist at the University of Montreal in Canada.
To get a better handle on this dark and forgotten corner of published research, Nature dug into the figures to find out how many papers actually do go uncited (explore the full data set and methods). It is impossible to know for sure, because citation databases are incomplete. But it's clear that, at least for the core group of 12,000 or so journals in the Web of Science -- a large database owned by Clarivate Analytics in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania -- zero-citation papers are much less prevalent than is widely believed. Web of Science records suggest that fewer than 10% of scientific articles are likely to remain uncited. But the true figure is probably even lower, because large numbers of papers that the database records as uncited have actually been cited somewhere by someone. "The new figures [...] suggest that in most disciplines, the proportion of papers attracting zero citations levels off between five and ten year after publication, although the proportion is different in each discipline," the report adds. "Of all biomedical-sciences papers published in 2006, just 4% are uncited today; in chemistry, that number is 8% and in physics, it is closer to 11%. In engineering and technology, the uncitedness rate of the 2006 cohort of Web of Science-indexed papers is 24%, much higher than in the natural sciences."
To get a better handle on this dark and forgotten corner of published research, Nature dug into the figures to find out how many papers actually do go uncited (explore the full data set and methods). It is impossible to know for sure, because citation databases are incomplete. But it's clear that, at least for the core group of 12,000 or so journals in the Web of Science -- a large database owned by Clarivate Analytics in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania -- zero-citation papers are much less prevalent than is widely believed. Web of Science records suggest that fewer than 10% of scientific articles are likely to remain uncited. But the true figure is probably even lower, because large numbers of papers that the database records as uncited have actually been cited somewhere by someone. "The new figures [...] suggest that in most disciplines, the proportion of papers attracting zero citations levels off between five and ten year after publication, although the proportion is different in each discipline," the report adds. "Of all biomedical-sciences papers published in 2006, just 4% are uncited today; in chemistry, that number is 8% and in physics, it is closer to 11%. In engineering and technology, the uncitedness rate of the 2006 cohort of Web of Science-indexed papers is 24%, much higher than in the natural sciences."
It's perfectly clear why this is. You *have* to publish something, whether it has wider merit or not. So you end up with a large number of probably correct and probably original paper, that nonetheless don't advance the state of the art and don't get any cites. There's a very strong disincentive to wait until you have something genuinely unique and innovative.
I think the problem of uncited papers isn't that big of a deal, it's quite rare and it doesn't necessarily say that the paper was entirely useless (e.g. the industry will often use academic papers but rarely cite them since they do not publish, or do so very rarely).
What I find much more concerning is that modern peer-reviewed journals only care about successful hypotheses. Doing something interesting isn't enough, it also has to be demonstrably better, stronger, faster or something else along those lines. Failure is brushed aside and quickly forgotten, even though having access to all of the failed attempts of thousands of scientists would be an absolute treasure trove.
How many hours, days, weeks of work could be avoided by knowing that someone else has already traveled down your current path and figured out that it wasn't working? How many ideas have been lost due to a minor issue that the original would-be author didn't catch? How much more efficient would our science be if we also documented legitimate failure (as opposed to failure from sloppiness, outright bad ideas, and so on)?
Huh? There is nothing fundamentally wrong with meta analysis. I do not understand why you think "it's no longer science because the underlying hypotheses are not falsifiable". Most meta-analysis papers I have seen are about hypotheses which are falsifiable.