Citations
The merits of a primitive warrior are measured by a number of enemy scalps he/she is able to demonstrate. The merits of a bisnessman are perhaps measured by the total of his/her bank accounts, but this is usually not demonstrated. The quatifier of scientific merits is relatively easy to access, at least with TU Delft subscribtion. You’d go to ISI web of knowledge, www.isiknowledge.com, and ask for somebody’s citation report. They give numbers that show how many times the creative works of prof. X have been cited by his/her colleagues. Nobody would pretend that this quantifies scientific excellence or usefulness or creativity of an individual. Yet the latter three are rather subjective, while the number of citations: here it is. This kind of vanity is more for mature researches, the number stays low while you work hard on your research and grows steadily while you hardly work. There is a certain similarity with a bank account.
So I consulted ISI to check the number for my favourite researcher (shamefully, his name is Yuli Nazarov). And look: I’ve found a nice round number of 6,000. Something rather satisfying: not that it is exceptionally high for my age, not that I find it corresponding to time and energy invested into recearch, yet it shows that the reasearch has been noticed.
The only phrase in the backgound of my mind irritates me, the phrase I have recently heard from a much more merited colleage : "Most theoretical papers are either cited or read". The irritation comes from the fact that I can not decide upon my papers: do I pferer them to be read or to be cited?
It was so much simpler to demonstrate some dried enemy scalps…
