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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."
One main purpose of citations is to use prior observations and experiments to build the case for a hypothesis that is then tested in the remainder of the paper. The other main purpose is to provide support for portions of the methodology that aren't intuitive. There are other reasons for citations, but these are the main ones.
However, this is frequently abused by reviewers and editors. A comprehensive literature review is often expected at the start of papers, which really isn't necessary to support the hypothesis. Many times this is used by reviewers and editors to insist that their own works be cited and increase the profile of their own papers.
A comprehensive list a review shouldn't be necessary at the start of papers, yet it's frequently expected in the peer review process. Citing prior literature is important, but just to the extent necessary to support the hypothesis that the paper intends to examine.
[citation needed]
I was once the director of a university lab. I would expect completely uncited papers to be rare, perhaps the last in a series of useless papers. Most academics cite their own papers and the papers of a small circle of peers. The citation web has to be full of these self-scratching cliques. The papers that are cited across multiple cliques are the real influencers. These are much less common. Rather than debunking the uncited myth, they should be debunking the myth that cited papers are influential. Most are not.
well... if the research papers weren't in PAYWALLED journals then it would be possible for people to get at them and read them, wouldn't it? *sigh*...
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)?
An entirely predictable result from "publish or perish". People publish a lot of irrelevant, marginally incremental and generally boring and worthless papers.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Oh my god, I feel another #metoo coming...
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
the conferences fight this by requiring the author to commit to presenting for themself.
Which breaks when nationalist governments get elected and enact travel policies making presentation in person impractical or impossible.
No one is going to write about how a paper reporting a negative result spared them from hours of wasted time.
I disagree with this. The right place to cite a negative result, as I see it, is at the end of the literature review, just before the methodology. This way, the cited negative result helps to justify the choice of one methodology over another seen not to work.