In my article "Documents are the Life of Scientific Research, April 19, 2013, ScienceNet" I said: "Scholars attach importance to quoting peer scientific literature to embody the scientific research concept of 'standing on the shoulders of peers'.A young returnee was recently asked to attend an in-house professional symposium, in which a well-known company's tech staff cited drawings from a paper published by their team, but only one other article was cited below the PPT.I have examined two relevant documents to confirm this fact.I found that the author of the paper cited by the technician, who had not yet been published (only submitted a database of manuscripts), had a large bowl in the field, while the young scholar's paper was published in international authorities.This brings us to a serious topic about scientific citations: scientific citations and scholarly cultivation.
As we all know, the general meaning of scientific citation is to let readers objectively understand the history of a research direction through citation analysis, understand the contribution and influence of peer results, and lay the foundation for innovation.Many years ago, an old professor told me that when he reviewed a National Natural Science Foundation project, he found that the scientific questions asked by the applicant were too old and lacking in documentation.In my report How to Write an Application for a Quality National Natural Science Foundation, I said that if an applicant had several papers in the mainstream publications of that year (January-March) in the citation, I would add a literature literacy score.
We often complain that in the course of reviewing manuscripts, some reviewers ask for additional citations to their team papers.This situation requires specific analysis, and if it is true that the reviewers are missing papers published in connection with the manuscript under review, such comments are warranted.If it is only for the self-interest of the reviewer, such as in order to increase the frequency of citations of his own paper, the author is required to quote a non-targeted paper, it is a learning style.Recently, a scholar told me that he served as editor-in-chief of a major international professional journal on the editorial board to the full editorial board, pointing out that some reviewers have asked authors to cite their papers. For quite some papers, there are reviewers request for citation of his/her own paper(s) with a generic reason such as expanding the literature review. This situation creates an unfair and asymmetrical advantage to the reviewers: During the review process, the reviewers can `force’ the authors to cite the reviewers’ papers in an effort to increase their own visibility/citation counts.”
In my scientific research experience, the citations of every academic paper published are based on the needs of the content of the paper, there are no raw citations, let alone the title of the author of the citation paper.In fact, in the face of rigorous scholars, only the content of the paper is innovative and meaningful, and there is no author is a big name.This is also the reason why I objected to the reference to "important author" in Wuyi Mountain's blog post "Modifying important author's article - Diary Extract 973".In my opinion, the manuscripts of "important authors" (usually the leading figures in academia) should be better written.I think this may be characteristic of Chinese academic circles, some journal editors and editors place too much emphasis on manuscript authorship.I have published professional publications papers in Europe and the United States reviewers seriously revised my manuscript, but it is by no means my author has any special title, I guess there are two main reasons: one is that the reviewer thinks the manuscript is good.Second, my manuscript does have some problems in English writing, at least some places do not conform to English expression customs, so the reviewer does a good job to help revise.
On the current problems in scientific citations, our academic scholars are well aware of them.Remember that we didn't care much about the number of citations for our papers, because it was "not necessary" for annual performance reviews and job promotion, and it was mainly about whether the papers were published in major professional journals.Of course, we were relatively pure in the scientific community at that time, and we only paid attention to whether the published papers were received by the SCI database, that is, only Chinese scholars called them SCI papers.Because, after all, a SCI paper has a little reward for improving family life.It was later discovered that most international professional journals, including Chinese science, all papers published in the English version of the scientific bulletin were included in the SCI database, so it was no longer of concern.It is only in recent years that the phenomenon of highlighting high-citation papers has been emphasized, except that some scholars use high-citation papers to analyze popular research fields as normal behavior.
I was once invited to review a manuscript by an Indian author in one of our major professional publications.This manuscript cites five representative papers from my research direction.I speculate that the editor-in-chief invited me to review the manuscript in two ways: 1) I am an expert in the field and suitable for reviewing the manuscript; and 2) because the manuscript cites five of my papers, "test" whether I will release water.I reviewed the manuscript carefully and found that although the manuscript was well selected and the experimental technique was good, there were many problems, so I gave a very detailed opinion and finally gave the results of "re-submission after overhaul".Since then, I have received the revised draft submitted by the author, and based on the author's revised draft carefully answering all the questions I have asked, I recommend publishing it.
A quote from a book needs to be taken seriously.I once said in related articles that for a scholar who values citations, the citations (references) that follow his published papers sometimes give the reader more important information than the results themselves.Serious readers can often benefit from citations of such scholarly papers.Citation does not have to be "big money", let alone excessive self-quotation or mutual references.In fact, a scholar's academic discipline and influence ultimately depends on the level of achievement itself, and serious scholars do not value whether to quote their own papers.Some high-citation papers are not completely consistent with the level of achievement, because most high-citation papers belong to hot fields and the number of researchers is large.If this bad academic habit develops, it may gradually become the trigger of academic misconduct, and such scholars will be kicked out of academia sooner or later, which will bring serious consequences to scholars, which should be paid attention to.
Planned on June 15, 2022 and completed on February 6, 2023