Comments on: How many citations does a paper have to get before it’s significantly above baseline impact for the field?

By: Scientists Make Hilarious Proofreading Error | Viral Pup

Scientists Make Hilarious Proofreading Error | Viral Pup — Sat, 31 Oct 2015 17:18:29 +0000

[…] of her papers are substandard is beyond our capacity to assess, but one of them has been cited a very impressive 115 times and it is clear that Gabor deserves to be publicly known for more than an accidental […]

By: billyarberry

billyarberry — Tue, 24 Feb 2015 22:37:59 +0000

Most helpful. I was never an academic and published only a few articles here and there during my career. Interesting to see where my most successful paper stands. Google scholar conveniently provides citation counts.

By: Praveena Chandra

Praveena Chandra — Tue, 10 Jun 2014 02:25:58 +0000

Very interesting. I’m working on analysis of patent citations for my thesis and have come across the same problem; how many citations should a patent receive before it can be called “highly cited”!
I see that this blog was 2 years old. Have you done any follow up work on this? Also, I cant see the table that you mention. I’m using Mac Firefox.

By: Jenny Williams (@Irene_Gulliver)

Jenny Williams (@Irene_Gulliver) — Wed, 17 Apr 2013 22:26:32 +0000

Thank you! I did remember about relevancy after I’d posted the comment, and I am going to e-mail my subject librarian tomorrow to see what they recommend.

By: Scott Weingart

Scott Weingart — Wed, 17 Apr 2013 22:18:24 +0000

Hi Jenny; that’s a good question, but unfortunately there is no good answer. Relevancy is usually more important than citation, so I would suggest checking it out of your library first (or, if it’s not in your library, using Interlibrary Loan) and seeing how relevant it is to your dissertation. The example you gave (Masquerade and Civilization) seems to have been very useful to other people, with 441 citations – that’s quite a lot in the humanities – but again, it’s always a balance. Often there are very high quality books that are relatively infrequently cited, and vice-versa. If you’re wondering what the best secondary sources to get are, I’d suggest first talking to a subject matter librarian, and from there, after finding a few key articles or books, look at what they cite, or at what cite them.

By: Jenny Williams (@Irene_Gulliver)

Jenny Williams (@Irene_Gulliver) — Wed, 17 Apr 2013 22:05:13 +0000

Basically I’m trying to work out whether I should be buying some of the secondary texts for my dissertation/thesis, and was wondering how many times you would expect a book (for example Masquerade and Civilization: The Carnivalesque in 18th-century English Culture and Fiction) to be referenced in other writers’ texts in order to consider it a worthwhile purchase? Hope this makes better sense!

By: Scott Weingart

Scott Weingart — Tue, 25 Sep 2012 13:48:54 +0000

Thanks for letting me know! I changed the table to a wordpress table plugin; can you see it now?

By: Angela

Angela — Tue, 25 Sep 2012 12:54:13 +0000

Hmm, not seeing the table/Excel file here. They show up in Google Reader, though. (Mac, tried Firefox and Chrome.)

What software are you using to make your charts?