crunching numbers

One of my xmas holiday traditions is that I check the science citation index to see whether anybody has bothered citing my old research papers. This year, my five earliest works have gone empty-handed, but most others have still received a fair number of citations. The top three in new citations are:

1. my proteins and pressure review, which is also at the top of the overall citation list (updated version now online).

2. Jaikaran et al. J. Mol. Biol. -- an amyloid paper that has risen steeply to no. 4 of my ranking and will probably reach no. 3 next year. From the same project comes:

3. Higham et al. FEBS Lett. (climbing to No. 9). Very pleased to see the amyloid papers are still finding attention. My own role in these was only a minor one, but the first authors definitely deserve the recognition.

My Hirsch index (number n of citations that have been cited at least n times) is stuck at 16 now, which is a shame. For six years after retiring from research I watched in amazement as it kept climbing without any input from me.

Anyhow. Always fun to do some statistics. More about this next year.

summing up

one of my end-of-year rituals is checking the citation counts of my papers, and as in previous years I have been pleasantly surprised to see that all but two (no.2,3) of the 18 papers listed here have acquired new citations this year. Even the earliest one, which is now 18 years old !

New on the list is the review:
Groß M (2000)
Current Protein and Peptide Science 1, 339-347
Proteins that convert from alpha helix to beta sheet: Implications for folding and disease
10 (9;6;5)

which has been a bit of a sleeper but may still rise to fame ...

German publications in April

in the monthly round-up of German publications, this time there is a rant about the unstoppable rankings epidemic and the Hirsch index, a feature about red blood cells, and a more medically oriented treatment of the recent gecko adhesive stories:


Groß M:
Nachrichten aus der Chemie 56, Nr 4, 410
Ausgeforscht: Am Fuß der Ranking-Leiter

Groß M:
Nachrichten aus der Chemie 56, Nr 4, 447
Blickpunkt Biowissenschaften: Rund ums rote Blutkörperchen


Groß M:
Spektrum der Wissenschaft Nr 4, 19-20
Gecko im Operationssaal

The last one appears to be available as podcast as well. Haven't dared to listen to these as yet -- the idea of somebody reading my texts to me is a bit scary and needs getting used to.

counting citations

Once a year, typically around this time, I visit the science citation index to check up on my old research papers. So here is my updated list of citations. I have to say I'm really chuffed to see that people still cite nearly half of the papers, even though I haven't been involved with any of this stuff for almost 8 years. So I'm not travelling around the conferences to blow my own trumpet and all that. Considering they are out there on their own, the papers are managing quite well, I think.

PS I don't include the books in the stats, but they too get cited every once in a while.

hirsch index

The Hirsch index is increasingly being used to compare research achievements, and it has been reported in Nature and discussed in the correspondence pages of Nature and the Nautilus blog.

Essentially, h is the number of papers that somebody has published that have been cited at least h times. So if you have a ranking of papers by citation numbers, you go down the list, rank number increases while citation number decreases. The last rank number which is equal to or smaller than the corresponding citation number is the h index.

I'm all in favour of the h-index as it has rewarded me
for doing nothing. I left research in 2000, when my
h-index (determined retrospectively) stood at 10.
Since then it has increased by one unit every year
without any input from me (not even self-citations)
and it is now 16, as you can see here.

But I think people whose career prospects depend on this kind of measure, should think very carefully about this ...