I may have uncovered another conspiracy. This time it’s to publish papers related to my postdoctoral research without citing me.
I like being cited, and when a few likely looking candidates came up in this week’s Pubcrawler alert I thought I was on to something.
Surely this review would reference my favourite paper or one of its siblings? {1}
Why didn’t this one cite this one ?
At a push, this new paper might even have cited this one .
But no.
Maybe I should actually read these new papers properly, rather than just skimming. There are quite probably some excellent reasons why my papers didn’t fit in.
Then again, papers have a finite citation lifespan, and in the fast-moving field of molecular biology, mine might be nearing the end of theirs.
Maybe I should just go and write some new ones {2}.
____________________________________
{1} All papers are under my maiden name. It’s very confusing, especially for me.
{2} It’s not outside the realms of possibility in my current job, although it won’t happen for a while. Look for me in acknowledgement sections though!
Hmm…I’m not sure whether I object more to papers that don’t cite mine, or to those that cite other papers that mine have refuted! 🙂
At least in the latter case you could publish a response to the paper, pointing out that they are citing outdated and inaccurate studies. If they just don’t cite you at all, your only recourse is to whine about it on your blog!
I could never be bothered to change my name. Now I realise, that if I actually had any publications, that would be a good thing 😉
One issue is that journals like my own, Nature, limit authors to 30 cites for Letters, 50 for articles. What do you think we should do about that? (Given print space issues.)
One side-effect of this policy, which many other journals not just NPG ones, have, is to encourage cites to review articles, which themselves contain refs to primary research papers, rather than to the papers themselves. These policies were developed before the citation industry that exists currently. How can they be changed to be more fair to the primary research author?
Not to mention the “et al”s.
Excellent questions! Citing all the appropriate literature does become a problem when you’re tight for space. I remember spending many hours trimming my first postdoc paper down to fit the PNAS template. When journals become online only (as many surely will), the costs will come down and the space guidelines will probably expand. I don’t imagine that this will apply to Nature any time soon though!
Citing the primary literature is important, like it or not, both to the papers’ authors and to journals trying to increase their impact factor. For that reason I always tried to avoid citing reviews. The exceptions were when I was summarising current knowledge in an area that was not directly relevant to my results or to the central ideas in the paper. For example, in my paper reporting on the evolution of transcriptional regulation of a particular human enzyme, I think I cited a review when summarising the biochemical analysis done to determine the functions of the enzyme. That left me more space to discuss the evolutionary and regulatory aspects of the locus, which were much more central to my work.
But doesn’t citing reviews consequently skew citation indexes, such that impact factors of review journals become disproportionately high? Then everybody wants to publish a review in one of those journals because it looks good on their CV / grant application. It pays to be working in a ‘sexy’ field.
That’s a good point. My review articles do get cited a lot more than my primaries, despite being in less prestigious journals. (I don’t know the actual impact factors). I wonder if this practice also encourages journals to dedicate more space to review articles at the expense of original research?
I suppose we just have to trust that recruiters and grant reviewers are aware of this bias! I usually list my reviews separately to my other papers on my CV – is this normal practice?
Yes, unfortunately citing reviews does skew as Lee points out. Do you think there is any chance of everyone being like the Earth scientists, and not publishing that often? 😉
Well, I can’t speak for all fields, but I don’t think you’re going to slow the molecular biologists and their kin down to geological time scales!
Peter Todd and Richard Ladle have pointed out in a recent letter to Nature that citation practices are imperfect: excessive citation of the author’s own work, citations that don’t support the argument in the paper, etc. the problem is that so much depends on these citations, from journal impact factors to assessment and funding of research.
Maxine, I’m there! I’m stranded down a cell culture cul-de-sac and have long since often thought I’m culturing ‘dirt’.
Lee, you shouldn’t take your cells for granite. You have to show them some lava. Then your results will rock.