Have you ever opened up your favorite journal and seen a new study that is not only in your line of research but also builds on work that you yourself have published? Now imagine flipping to the references (confess - we all go there first), and seeing your name... nowhere. How do you feel about this?
I got in the middle of a spat between one of my coauthors and an old friend last week. We submitted a paper to a journal that is not in my area, but in a business-related field. My old friend read the preprint that we sent him, and got very angry that we had not cited him. In truth, we did cite him, but apparently not enough: he sent us a list of the papers that, in his opinion, deserved mention in our paper, plus the half a dozen or so "foundational" papers that establish the theory. My friend accused me of not thinking highly enough of his "life's work" to put it in our paper. I managed to calm him down, but the episode left me thinking, not about him, but about the whole issue of who cites whom and how much.
My science addresses a huge system of mind-boggling complexity. When I do experiments to answer questions about how that system works, I sometimes get some really interesting data. However, I don't put much stock in those data, not because I'm such a terrible empiricist, but because I am certain that the questions we ask about this system are so naive that the answers to them will be, in the long run, irrelevant. Those social scientists among you know exactly what I mean: my entire discipline's summed scientific effort is that of a tiny worm eating its way through a 50 lb sack of flour.
While I have some faith in the theories that guide my research, I have no illusions that my mathematical models of the system or the data I collect will endure into the next decade. For me, this is all just a game. I get paid to work out puzzles: to propose clever but simplistic representations of a system that is going to take us at least another century or so to even begin to understand. Some people may interpret this as the attitude of a bad scientist; I would argue that it's the attitude of an honest one. I'll keep throwing my ideas against the wall, and if one or two of them stick I'll be pleasantly surprised. But I'm doing this for fun, not because I think I can eventually discover The Truth.
When my work isn't cited, I don't get upset about it. Either I assume that it was an oversight on the authors' part or I just shrug it off. I can't imagine wasting mental resources worrying about something so trivial. My ideas are published; what other people make of them is their own business. The only immediate effect that such oversights have is on my raise, which is calculated based in part on the "impact" (citations) my work is having in my field. But I didn't get into this line of work for the money.
Thursday, October 26, 2006
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8 comments:
Remember, AP, the words of Henry Kissenger: "Academic politics are so brutal precisely because the stakes are so small.."
On the issue of my role in science: I feel exactly the same way you do. My work isn't going to change the world, and it probably isn't even going to change my field in any appreciable way. I'm just good at doing what's expected of me, and I otherwise like the lifestyle.
But on the issue of citations: I don't know, I get kind of annoyed when people don't properly cite my work. It's not because I think my work is so important (please), but rather because it makes it oh-so-evident how shoddy the peer-review system is. If your stuff is published in mainstream, even top-tier journals, then people should not be "forgetting" to cite you. That implies very shoddy scholarship and failure to follow the work that comes before you. Then, if the reviewer fails to catch it, it means that they didn't pick the most appropriate people, since at least the mainstream stuff should be well known to a reviewer qualified to review that particular paper. Small papers, conferences, book chapters--fine if those are missed. But it's not right to miss big articles.
Recently I read a paper where something of mine was cited, but it was an old version of something which has since appeared in a big journal. Much worse was that they completely misinterpreted my results, claiming that I'd shown exactly the opposite of what I did show. Now that pissed me off.
Maybe I'm more sensitive since i'm still untenured, and greater citation of my work will mean greater likelihood of tenure.
Ianqui - being distorted or misinterpreted is grounds for getting angry. That's different from being overlooked. I also agree with you that being overlooked indicates shoddy scholarship. When I shrug it off, I think to myself, "They're idiots." But I don't get angry.
WTC - I thought that quote was apocryphal.
The business of being 'overlooked' is something which happens from time to time in my field too. However, I have given up worrying too much about it. After all, there are often so many things published in a particular field, that it is not always possible for everyone to keep up with everything. When these issues are added to the fact that not all libraries subscribe to all journals, then this gets to be almost inevitable in some cases.
Being misinterpreted is an entirely different matter. However, in both kinds of cases, if an ommission or misinterpretation is really culpable, I will sometimes e-mail authors. For the most part, they welcome the input.
The CP
What I worry about is the development of multiple parallel (redundant) lines of research because communities don't interact enough. For example, when I write a paper, there's a list of names I go down to see if the've done anything relevant recently. But it's entirely possible that there's someone in, say China, does the same thing, but with a different list of names. We could be doing exactly the same work for years and never know about it unless we happened to go to the same international conference or something.
And it's just not possible to keep up anymore. Look at the shelf space any major journal occupies, compared to 100 years ago.
I have published 2 "real" research papers. One has never been cited. The other has been cited only by one of the co-authors in a follow-up paper.
I have no pity!
Why worry about being cited in the scientific literature when your blog is probably your most widely read publication?
It just happened to me this week - the authors had thrown a lot of sconometric horsepower at a question, and at the end of the day found out exactly the thing we'd published 3 years earlier. Of course, we weren't cited.
If I took myself seriously, it would bother me. But since (like you), I view much of what we do as a game, I just chuckle at it. I will, however, tweak the other author the next time I run into him at a conference. With a bit of luck, maybe he'll buy me a drink to placate me. Now THAT would have some value.
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