Thursday 27 September 2012

Playing with Citation Statistics

I've always liked playing with the ISI Web of Science and seeing who has cited my papers (other than myself). My friend and colleague Jonathan Reizer used to say "The only person who references me enough is myself, and I'm not even sure about myself".

And in this day of age of everything being assessed by metrics, it's important to calculate your H-index for grant applications, etc. Last time I checked my H-index was 74 (which means I've published 74 papers that have been cited a minimum of 74 times each).

Apparently, there's a new toy for analyzing publication and citation statistics- Microsoft Academic Search, which I've just been checking out. It's cool in a sort of disturbing stalker-ish way that it's found photos of myself and various of my colleagues and correctly associated them with our publications. The embedded image below shows my 30 most frequent co-authors.




Once can also do silly things like calculating your connectedness to other scientists based on co-publication. Apparently there are four degrees of separation between myself and Albert Einstein:




One issue is that it appears to have missed 30+ papers of mine (possibly those published as Ian Paulsen rather than Ian T. Paulsen, I haven't bothered checking), and so all the statistics such as H-index, total citations, etc are not correct. Apparently I could manually edit it to add those publications, but I think that exceeds my level of enthusiasm. It does come up with fun but probably useless factoids, for instance I've apparently collaborated with 1676 co-authors from 1992 to 2011.


Hat tip to my old school friend Paul Wakelam for making me aware of the existence of Microsoft Academic Search.

1 comment:

  1. I find it fascinating that everyone seems to be four degrees from Einstein.
    It is also missing some of my papers, then again it has told me I am a co-author on papers I don't even remember....

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