Warning: severe vanity and ego inflation ahead...

Scientists are people. And as any person, I occasionally submit to brief periods of vanity. However, in this case, “staring in the mirror” takes the form of looking at the ISI web-of-knowledge citation index. The Thomson Reuters ISI Web of Knowledge is the end-all be-all of academic search engines. It is typically the first thing I turn to when looking for journal articles and scientific information (beat that Google). One of the most vane yet fun things (in a navel gazing sort of way) is to check out your own papers and see how often they’re being cited by other scientists in academic journals (or most frustrating for papers that you know should be cited more!).

They have a feature that lets you view the citations in “map” form. Here’s one of my better papers, from 2005, which has been cited around 40 times (a good number for physics).




Many of these people are collaborators or colleagues in one fashion or another. Some others are people I’ve not worked with, but have corresponded with on occasion, talked with at conferences or on trips, or in some form a friend. Others still (and perhaps most importantly) are people that I know in name only. These are people that only know of the work, and have considered it useful enough to cite in their own publications. On one hand it’s very flattering, and on the other it’s a good indication that this paper is judged to be of merit based on some objective criteria. On the left you can see that I’ve cited it once myself (so that really shouldn’t count). Others, like Deutsch or Hellwig for instance, were co-authors and friends, thus being closely connected to the paper.

For fun, you can turn on “multiple generations” of citations. Thus I can “mouse over” the other papers and quickly see how often they have been cited. Such vanity aside, it really brings to life the idea of “web of knowledge,” allowing you to graphically see how connected everything really is.



Here you can see that a paper by Olav Hellwig has been even more “successful” gathering a very impressive number of citations.