The science that’s never been cited

10% of papers being completely uncited is a little misleading. There is a long tail of papers with 1 or 2 citations that were hardly read beyond the abstract and only cited to up a paper&#x27;s number of references and had a few good keywords. That research is effectively uncited.<p>The reason for this isn&#x27;t really surprising: Most research isn&#x27;t that groundbreaking. Most research is done because if you don&#x27;t produce a paper every now and then or else the university will fire you. So you crank out that study you did on the insulating properties of the grey squirrel&#x27;s tail vs the red squirrel&#x27;s tail and you keep your job, although nobody gives a crap about how warm a squirrel&#x27;s tail is.

I wonder if part of the reason for uncited papers being so low is that authors cite their own papers in subsequent papers. For example, an author is studying field X, and publishes papers. No one cites the first paper. The author then writes a new paper on X, but cites the first paper. Thus, although no one but the author cited the papers that the author wrote, all but the last one have citations in other papers.<p>Another way this works is that authors in the same department may cite each other&#x27;s papers especially if the fields are somewhat related.<p>I wonder what the data would look like if they excluded citations by the authors of the original paper.

&gt; “Lack of citation cannot be interpreted as meaning articles are useless or valueless,” says David Pendlebury, a senior citations analyst at Clarivate.<p>On the other hand, presence of citation can not be interpreted as meaning articles are useful or valuable. For one, there could be chains of useless and valueless papers citing each other.

It seems to me, based to some extent on my own experience, that a paper has a harder time getting cited when it&#x27;s a bit off the beaten track (and might in fact be more original, trail-blazing and interesting), because by definition it&#x27;s a bit lonely in its field. Conversely, when the work is fairly derivative it gets lumped in with others and is easier to cite as part of the related work section of another paper, even if its influence is minimal.

I was looking into a CS academic who claimed to be widely cited. Mostly it was self-citation, in his own papers. He seemed to be the editor of a journal which published a lot of his own papers citing himself.<p>I couldn&#x27;t help thinking of that looking at the graph of decreasing uncited papers.

&gt; Then, checking on Google Scholar, Heneberg saw that many of the remaining papers actually had been referenced by other works indexed in the Web of Science, but had been missed because of data-entry errors or typos in the papers<p>I wonder if you could look at the number of citations to non-existent papers to find these typos. If you collected such a set, you could do a loose search against the list of published papers, and see how many are a close match. For instance, a typo in an author&#x27;s name or the paper&#x27;s title could be ignored while matching the journal, date and page could give the auditors a list of best guesses for this missed citations.

I wonder if citation research could become self sustaining, if it generates enough cited papers.

I like how the 3dB point for engineering papers is 4 years (that is where 50% of the papers remain uncited). I am a bit surprised it goes down from there. I have always felt that a big chunk of the engineering or technical papers out there reference technology that is obsolete after 5 years[1]. There are the seminal papers of course, the ones that it seems are always cited, but a huge chunk which were useful when published, are much less so later.<p>[1] No I don&#x27;t have a citation :-) but having written a few papers and looking for related work I found the chance of finding something relevant dropped precipitously when you got into papers that were more than a few years old.