Pete Lewis's blog

Oddly enough, while I was clicking around on the web today, I discovered this fact: that the journal article I wrote last year is currently the joint 8th most cited computer science paper of 2010 according to CiteSeer! (I'm actually listed as being 29th, due to the alphabetical ordering of those with an equal number of citations). Researchers are well known for their interest in statistics on citations - commonly referred to as bibliometrics - but this is an oddity.

Thinking about it, in order for a paper published in 2010 to be cited, you would really have to get your skates on. Firstly the paper must have been published in the last two and a half months, and then it must have been cited by another paper which has gone through peer review and been published since then. This is quite a mean feat, as most publications take several months from submission to publication. So, it's quite obvious that nothing from 2010 will really have been cited in earnest yet.

However, it seems that all the papers in the special issue in which I was published are all joint 8th in Citeseer's league table, since they were all cited by the special issue's overview paper, which drew together the common themes of the papers in the issue. So, we all have one citation. Which is more than most. Weirdly, seven papers have more than that! Hmm...

This is clearly quite daft, but seeing my name in that league table does look nice!