Bite-size factoid: Scientists hunger for fame

Originally published 5 July 1993

We are a nation of snackers.

We take our sus­te­nance, phys­i­cal and men­tal, in bite-sized bits. We crave instant gratification.

Our meals are dis­pensed from vend­ing machines in sin­gle-serv­ing por­tions or from fast-food empo­ri­ums. Our rela­tion­ships last about as long as a good meal used to. We refuse to read any­thing longer than a para­graph. We take our TV news in 30-sec­ond fac­toids. USA Today is our nation­al news­pa­per. VOX POP.

And we love lists. Top tens. The 25 Sex­i­est Peo­ple in Amer­i­ca. What’s HOT, what’s NOT. In and out. Who’s who.

Our atten­tion span is brief, about as long as the aver­age tele­vi­sion com­mer­cial. We can only watch a 90-minute movie if it’s non-stop action. We allowed Pres­i­dent Clin­ton 100 days to change the world, before we turned thumbs down in the polls. 100 days! That’s a lifetime.

Now the same Quik-Fix, eat-and-run spir­it is infil­trat­ing sci­ence. The last great bas­tion of self­less, patient com­mu­nal enter­prise is being Warholized. Heroes are replaced by media super­stars. Admired researchers become glit­terati. Lab is pit­ted against lab, coun­try against coun­try, in a who’s-on-top-for-the-moment sweepstakes.

The imme­di­ate pur­vey­or of all of this is Sci­ence Watch, an eight-page newslet­ter pub­lished ten times year­ly by the Insti­tute for Sci­en­tif­ic Infor­ma­tion (ISI) in Philadel­phia. Sci­ence Watch is here to tell us what in the vast inter­na­tion­al enter­prise called sci­ence is hip, hot, where it’s at.

ISI is a prof­it-mak­ing orga­ni­za­tion found­ed by Eugene Garfield, a man who saw a need and filled it. Basi­cal­ly, ISI is a vast data bank, com­pil­ing infor­ma­tion — authors, sub­jects, cita­tions (ref­er­ences to pre­vi­ous papers), and so on — for more than 600,000 sci­en­tif­ic arti­cles per year, culled from more than 3,000 sci­en­tif­ic jour­nals worldwide.

The key word in the pre­ced­ing para­graph is “cita­tions.”

It is a rule in sci­ence that every paper cites by foot­note^[1] all pre­vi­ous­ly pub­lished work that bears imme­di­ate­ly upon the sub­ject. The cita­tion rule insures that new research is firm­ly anchored in the net­work of knowl­edge that is sci­ence. It is the inter­con­nect­ed­ness of sci­ence that gives us con­fi­dence in the valid­i­ty of sci­en­tif­ic knowledge.

ISI assumes that the num­ber of times a paper is cit­ed is a mea­sure of that paper’s worth, per­haps not an infal­li­ble mea­sure but the best there is to be had. An uncit­ed paper is assumed to have made very lit­tle con­tri­bu­tion to knowl­edge, since it leads nowhere. A paper cit­ed by many authors is assumed to be the kind of incip­i­ent work from which much new knowl­edge springs.

With the appro­pri­ate stroking, a com­put­er can be made to spit out any sort of list from the data base. The Big Ten areas of research. The Hot Top­ics in biol­o­gy. The 25 Most Pres­ti­gious research insti­tu­tions. The 50 Most Pro­lif­ic scientists.

Just look at those juicy head­lines in Sci­ence Watch: “Asth­ma Ago­nist, Quark Quest Excite Insights, Incite Cites.” Is this more than we want­ed to know about sci­ence? Have the folks in Philly final­ly fig­ured how to turn sci­ence into pop culture?

What­ev­er you want to know about sci­ence, the data base has the answers. And pos­es nifty new questions.

Britain pub­lish­es almost twice as many sci­en­tif­ic papers as France, although the two nations have the same pop­u­la­tion. The mean num­bers of cita­tions for British and French papers is near­ly the same. Which nation is pro­found and which is mere­ly prolific?

Tiny Switzer­land has a mean cita­tion rate sig­nif­i­cant­ly greater than Britain or France. Who gets the biggest bang for their research bucks?

Yury Struchkov, a chemist at the Insti­tute for Orga­noele­men­tal Chem­istry in Moscow aver­aged a paper every 3.9 days between 1981 and 1990, mak­ing him the most pro­lif­ic sci­en­tif­ic author in the world. Clear­ly, Struchkov has lots of peo­ple work­ing for him. What con­sti­tutes legit­i­mate author­ship in science?

Joachim Mess­ing, a mol­e­c­u­lar biol­o­gist at Rut­gers Uni­ver­si­ty pub­lished only 35 papers dur­ing the same peri­od, but gar­nered 18,229 cita­tions, mak­ing him the most cit­ed author in the world. Does that make him the world’s best scientist?

Wat­son and Crick­’s his­toric 1953 paper on the struc­ture of DNA was cit­ed 1,089 times dur­ing the peri­od 1955 – 1985. The 1951 paper by Lowry, Rose­brough, Farr, and Ran­dall on pro­tein mea­sure­ment with the Folin phe­nol reagent was cit­ed 102,134 times dur­ing the same peri­od. Lowry, Rose­brough, Farr, and Ran­dall who?

Dur­ing the peri­od 1989 – 90, the cold fusion paper of Fleis­chman and Pons reg­u­lar­ly showed up in Sci­ence Watch’s rank­ing of the 10 hottest papers in physics. Is cold fusion hot science?

And so on.

Aca­d­e­m­ic depart­ments will increas­ing­ly use cita­tion analy­sis as a basis for grant­i­ng pro­mo­tion and tenure. Research super­stars will glit­ter, and those left out will grumble.

Gov­ern­ment agen­cies will increas­ing­ly use cita­tion analy­sis for fund­ing deci­sions. The rich will get rich and the poor poorer.

As the cita­tion sweep­stakes heats up one can expect more self-cita­tion, cita­tion of friends, pub­lish­ing papers piece­meal, cloning of papers, repub­lish­ing in for­eign lan­guage jour­nals, and oth­er dubi­ous designs to inflate the statistics.

It was inevitable. Sci­ence Watch has tapped into an irre­sistible nation­al trend. Sci­en­tists are not immune to snack cul­ture. They love lists, espe­cial­ly if they are on them. Like the rest of us, they hunger for their 15 min­utes of fame.

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^[1]: C. Ray­mo, “Prun­ing the Tree of Sci­ence,” Boston Globe, Jan. 21, 1991.