Re: Research Illusion

I agree with the value of the wisdom of the crowd effect in many  
cases, however it should be controlled somehow to prevent the  
emergence of "foolishness of the crowd". E.g., I see many sets of  
publications that are many times acknowledged just because the authors  
copy-paste them blindly from each other over and over. In many of  
these case the publications are out-dated, anecdotal, and newer papers  
in their shadow are not  regarded anymore.




On 08 May 2009, at 21:41, Jeremy Carroll wrote:

>
> Google scholar provides citation counts, which while still a fairly  
> rough measure, does include an idea of the importance of any piece  
> of work.
>
> In particular citation counts can be high for a good piece of  
> research engineering and one paper about it. (Jena follows this  
> model). This certainly helped with my US Visa application (they look  
> at citation counts).
>
> Jeremy

Pieter De Leenheer

Semantics Technology & Applications Research Laboratory
Vrije Universiteit Brussel

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Received on Saturday, 9 May 2009 13:29:10 UTC