How many citations are actually a lot of citations?

In a previous blog post, I suggested to my younger colleagues that while they should not care so much about the impact factor of the journals they published in (as long as these journals are well-read in their respective fields of research), they should care quite a lot about these papers being cited, and cited by others not self-cited!

A few months ago, I was listening to the introductory talk of for a prestigious award from our national organization when one statement hit me: a physicist with 2000 or more citations is part of the 1% most cited physicists worldwide. There might have been a bit more to that statement but let’s work with it.

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Semantic Scholar

A new search engine, Semantic Scholar,  is being proposed to the scientific community and it uses artificial intelligence. Right now it is limited to computer science papers according to the website.

Let see how this one evolves!

 

Business management meet student mentoring

There is Nothing so Unequal as the Equal Treatment of Unequals

– Leadership and the One Minute Manager

If someone would have told me 15 years ago that I would write about a blog post on the link between some business management principals and student supervision, I would probably have reply “are you crazy, science is pure, untainted (yeah!). Business is all about money and nothing about peoples”.

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About recommendations, guidelines and those who ultimately generate them

Progress always involves risks. You can’t steal second base and keep your foot on first base.

– Frederick B. Wilcox

Coming back from attending a major meeting in our field. I find it interesting to notice that the words “recommendation” and “guidelines” were some of the most used. Most of the time this is good and provides a common languages. However, once in a while someone use these words to shutdown an otherwise very interesting work.

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Memory of my first major peer-reviewed paper 

My very first manuscript published in Physical Review Letters (major physics journal!) came about by drawing figures on piece of papers (basically mocked-up figures) with a colleague of mine!

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