Papers introducing concepts that have since become common knowledge are often under cited by researchers, skewing those articles’ true impact. The number of times a paper is cited is widely seen as marker of its scientific credibility. But some concepts or ideas are so well known that no one cites them. It would be unusual for an article on, say, general relativity to refer to Albert Einstein’s original 1915 paper on the subject. Xiangyi Meng, a physicist at Northwestern University in the US, who led the new study, calls such non-references “hidden citations”.
In their work, Meng and colleagues used a machine-learning model to analyse one million papers on the arXiv preprint server. It detected catchphrases that suggest specific discoveries and then linked each to at least one foundational paper. The researchers identified 343 topics in physics that accumulate hidden citations, each of which has at least one catchphrase.
The researchers found that the ratio of hidden citations – i.e. citations that should have been made but were not – to actual citations for foundation papers was, on average 0.98:1, suggesting that papers usually acquire hidden citations at the same rate as citations. oundational papers that acquire hidden citations are nevertheless still highly cited, with an average of 434 citations, compared with an average of 1.4 citations for all physics papers.
Mang explains that hidden citations are also inevitable given that it is difficult for researchers to cite every paper or concept used in their work, which is why, he says, it is important that they are counted in some way.
More: https://physicsworld.com/a/hidden-citations-conceal-the-true-impact-of-scientific-research/
