Thursday, April 24, 2014

Self-Check

This is a poll I have done before (4 years ago), and I am interested to see if the results will be different now. I am curious about how often you check your citation statistics -- number of citations, h-index, who is citing you etc. You can sign up to get alerts about this, or you can go and check yourself at one of the citation-counting sites. How often do you get information about your citations?

Whether or not you answered the poll 4 years ago (in April! is there something about April that makes me think about citations?), do you think your citation-checking habits have changed in the last few years? 

So:

How often do you check your citation statistics?
  
pollcode.com free polls 

17 comments:

Anonymous said...

I put a reminder in my calendar to update my CV every 3/4 months. I do my citation counts update at the same time.

a physicist said...

I can't find the prior post, but my answer hasn't changed. Citations = data, and I love looking at data. And this is data about me! Yay narcissism! I check my citations once a week, on the day that ISI updates them (which currently is Thursdays). Sad but true.

Anonymous said...

I check more often than feels quite 'right' but I get Google Scholar alerts about papers citing mine (which I like because I see relevant work sometimes from very different journals than what I regularly search quickly) but that draws me over to it and then of course I look. I am TT so that's part of it too. You look at these and think "please cite me and write me a good external letter!"

Anonymous said...

I don't really have to check as I have set notifications to do that for me.

Anonymous said...

If you set up an alert then your answer to the poll is 'as often as possible'.

Anonymous said...

I also check other "article metrics", particularly the number of downloads or accesses. Maybe I am too obsessive? I don't have that many articles, but the ones I do have are part of a very new field, so it's interesting to see how many hits there are in a week or so. The large upward bumps are pitifully gratifying to me!

Morgan Price said...

Less often than I used to -- feeling more established

EliRabett said...

Mostly when Eli is checking someone else out. BTW, Ann Harzings publish or perish (uploadable) is a good way to access citation statistics on Google Scholar.

Claus Wilke said...

To "a physicist": Google Scholar updates almost every day...

Looking up who cites you is a great way to keep up with the current literature in your field, so every serious scientist should do this.

Anonymous said...

You should add "when I'm up for promotion/review". This can provide great ammo for talking about your work in context and without personal grandstanding. It's really the only time I look at metrics/citations.

a physicist said...

Thanks, Claus! I do check Google Scholar maybe once a week or so (less often than I check ISI). I think of it as less reliable for citation data, but good at giving me a heads-up when someone puts something on arXiv that cites my work. You and others are right, this is a good way to keep up with relevant literature.

Anonymous said...

I've never understood the idea "Looking up who cites you is a great way to keep up with the current literature in your field, so every serious scientist should do this."

I haven't got time to read 500 papers a year, most of which are dreck. I also change fields every decade or so, so who is citing my older papers is really not of much interest to me.

There's got to be a better way to keep up with a field!

Whoosh... said...

I check several times a week when I'm about to hand in a grant proposal or something that ha my CV attached: "please cite this paper once more to increase my h-factor!!!" Exciting and sad at the same time.

Anonymous said...

Since I put myself on google scholar I've been checking a lot more often. It's just so easy to click my profile after browsing the lit or checking my alerts... Not sure how healthy it is though!

Anonymous said...

There are three reasons I check:

1. I'm applying for jobs

2. A friend is playing around and checking our friends and everyone we know (happens once or twice).

3. Very occasionally (once a year?) to see how a paper is being received by the community. For instance, one of my papers was published in a very nice journal last year, and a lot of seemingly derivative work has been published, but no citations -- I don't know why. It also doesn't come up very easily on Web of Science so I must not have used the right keywords somehow...

George said...

Re: "keeping up with the field". I ignore the majority of what cites my work. There are some recent papers I've written, where I am still working in the same area. Seeing who cites those papers can often turn up something that I want to read. So no, nobody is reading every one of the 500 papers that cites their work each year. But citations do help me find occasional papers. Especially by authors I didn't previously know of.

Anonymous said...

We are required to report our citation statistics for our annual evaluation.