Rating my scientific impact

[terriko]

A while ago, I saw a mention in a UNM newsletter about Google Scholar profiles and decided to give it a try. Like many people in my field, I already keep a list of publications on my website, but this had graphs! Citation counts! I wasn't too sure about this whole social-media-for-researchers aspects, but I like graphs.

I had totally forgotten about it 'till a few days ago when I got a reminder email, and upon looking at my profile I was pleased to see that my very first paper now has 60 citations. Sixty!

For context, the average citation rate in computer science was 3.75 from the period 2000-2010 (Source: Times Higher Education), and even the average citation rate for science in general was 10.81. So 60 seems awesome, even if average may be a weird number for something that I know is a power law distribution. Still, go me! I've got a few above-average papers, mostly the spam work (I was the first to apply artificial immunology to the spam problem, so subsequent people working in that space generally cite me) but I notice that SOMA's almost made it up to 30 citations, and that's the first of my papers in the web space.

It's still a pretty modest accomplishment in the grand scheme of things. Check out Paul's list or Steph's list if you want to feel small, but those are both totally amazing, exceptional people who run whole labs. For my weight class as a newly minted PhD, I'm happy enough, but I need to do more...

So now to take that pride and turn it into a totally awesome, citation-worthy paper summing up my remaining thesis work!

Comments

[gailcarmichael]

That really IS awesome! You also inspired me to set up my Google Scholar profile (I was working on my ACM profile today anyway, so why not). I was happy to see my paper about my mini-course with 10 citations. ;)

I think the work that has the most citation potential is the stuff I did on augmented reality and cognitive theories. Alas, it's been an uphill battle to get it published. It's under review for IEEE Pervasive, so fingers crossed I can finally get it out there.

[heliumbreath]

Speaking of immunology, earlier today I was talking to a researcher who was exploring the relations between decompression sickness ("the bends") and immunological/inflammatory responses more normally seen from other causes. It's sometimes amazing how quickly links between different things jump across multiple fields.

[terriko]

Science is awesome! :)