Academic Citation Metrics

Discussions center on citation counts, h-index, impact factors, and similar metrics for evaluating academic papers and researchers, including issues like gaming, citation rings, and proposals for alternatives such as PageRank-like systems.

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e.g sfdora.org SF DOI CrossRef FAQ PubMed researchtrends.com AI www.cs citations citation papers journals impact paper index journal publications researchers

Sample Comments

petschge Aug 21, 2019 View on HN

No, because it counts citations from influential papers with a higher weight.

ekm2 Jul 15, 2013 View on HN

We need to have HN for academic research papers:Karma counts as the citation index,or something similar.

fdr May 26, 2014 View on HN

I think you may be interested in the "h-index" and related metrics.http://www.cs.ucla.edu/~palsberg/h-number.htmlhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H-indexhttp://researchguides.uic.edu/hindex

amelius Aug 14, 2017 View on HN

Perhaps we should use the equivalent of "page-rank" for scientific papers and their citations as a quality measure (?)

megaremote Apr 23, 2019 View on HN

Do you have any other benchmark apart from citations?

al2o3cr Aug 2, 2017 View on HN

Seems like this is a case of "whatever you measure will be gamed": counting citations is an important part of how academics are evaluated at work, so we get flag-planting behavior to maximize that metric with minimal effort.There's a similar issue in journal publishing: counting "published works" without regard for where leads to journals that will publish literally anything for cash.

userbinator Jul 10, 2014 View on HN

Academics are judged on stupid factors depending on the quantity of publications and citations rather than on the quality of their research.This reminds me of pagerank and SEO. In fact this ring is basically the equivalent of black-hat SEO's link-farms for academic journals.

fwungy Apr 27, 2023 View on HN

It's actually the impact of the paper that matters, how many cites it gets.

cousin_it Jan 10, 2020 View on HN

Since the valuable service provided by publishers is, more or less, predicting future citations of a research work for funding purposes, what do people think of using a PageRank-like system for that instead? That way, instead of trying to publish in a high-impact journal, people will just put their papers online and try to get them approved by high-impact researchers. I think that could be just as reliable signal of quality as the current system, while costing less money, because high-impact res

carusooneliner Aug 21, 2019 View on HN

Regrettable that the article begins by outing a prof from an unheard of university in India, who probably publishes in low repute journals and conference. Ideally the citing malfeasance score should be weighted based on journal and conference reputation.