I got cited today! I’m not an academic and have published no academic papers (I doubt anything I wrote as an undergrad was groundbreaking), but I am a low-rent news writer for an E-list website. And today, a C-list website cited me! They didn’t mention by name, and it’s not that phone call from the Pulitzer Committee that I keep anticipating, but a journey of a thousand miles, and all that.
Hell yeah!!! Damn right I remember!! Daphne Patai and Noretta Koertge referenced my unpublished work The Amazon’s Brother in their book Professing Feminism, and it was like I was a real person with a real voice and stuff!!
My first credit was being mentioned in a paper by two prominent Computer Science profs. (One of which I got to know somewhat and who became really, really prominent. Even non-CS people know the name.) I had found an error in a draft copy of their paper and I was thanked in the end of the revised version.
That lead to my own, better result that came out the next year. And that got cited of bunch of times quite quickly but I don’t recall which paper would have cited it first.
And that result lead directly a few years later to my Big Result that has thousands of citations and 6 figure hits on Google.
I was driving down the highway, a little tired after a long shift. Then red and blue lights came up everywhere behind me. I slowed the car down and pulled over on to the shoulder.
I rolled down the window as the officer walked towards my car. “Do you have any idea how fast you were going? I’m going to have to give you a citation.”
“That’s okay, officer. I thought you were going to give me a ticket. You just want to quote me in a speech or essay, or note you read my journal article. That’s okay by me.”
We did a survey of a certain littoral California area, and it got published in a small local publication since we were the first, but it was kinda crap as a paper, just a listing of the species in the various inter-tidal zones on a rather small beach. But the Team who did a much better paper on that area did cite us, I think we had found two species that they didn’t- ten years later, and yeah, they were likely all gone by that time.
I was in a bookstore reading a book by pro wrestling writer Greg Oliver when I saw that he had cited an interview a friend and I had done with one of the subjects of the book. Since then I’ve seen it referenced in obituary articles of wrestlers the subject of our interview discussed.
I have a contribiting author credit on a book about control systems that got a few cites back in the day. That was cool, and helped suppress my tendency towards imposter syndrome back then.
I wrote a technical article online about a current issue years ago that got cited in some fairly big papers like the Atlantic and Washington Post. I remember my first thought was, “Holy smokes I hope I didn’t make any mistakes.” I had no idea I would reach a big audience.
Many years ago I wrote some poker theory stuff for a magazine that got mentioned a bit in poker literature and got a good review from a couple of mathematicians who also play. I was very happy for that validation.
When I was in graduate school I wrote a survey article on my subspecialty, which was nice since it worked well with my literature search. It was cited by at least one paper in the next conference of my field. Survey articles are great - it lets lazy authors cite your survey article rather than using up references on a bunch of other papers.
About five years later when I was at Bell Labs the conference was in Cape Cod and my boss wanted to come along to see what my hobby was. (No ulterior motives, he was a great boss.) Half the papers in the proceedings cited me.
I remember when the Saudi embassador to Norway (or the communications person who wrote the op-ed for him) plagiarized sentences from my opinion letter critical of homeopathy to criticize protestors against Saudi human rights abuses. I think that’s the only time I’ve been “cited” so far.
Yes. There’s nothing as exciting as seeing your name in print. And a citation shows that somebody else read your stuff and is using it to bolster their own work, which is good for the ego.
For the next few years I’d look my article up in a university library, just amazed that my work had been distributed to so many far-flung places. Especially in the years before the internet, that was really something.
That’s me! I wrote this stuff! I took those pictures! And now it’s here in this place I never visited before!
A much later publication let me tell a group of students I was lecturing that “Wikipedia cites me!”
I have no idea what my first citation was. If I cared, I suppose I could look myself up in the Science Citation Index.
I do have a curious story to tell about citations. Visiting the school where I got my PhD, I showed an interesting counter-example to an obvious conjecture to one of my former professors. He was interested and wanted to cite it in one of his papers. So he asked me to publish it. It was pretty simple and I demurred. I suggested he include the example, crediting me, in his paper. This is perfectly legitimate. Instead…
He happened to be editor-in-chief of an Amer. Math. Soc. journal. He wrote the paper, but put my name on it, refereed it, accepted it for publication, and cited it.
Not a citation of a publication, but the first time my name was mentioned in print as a mathematician: While I was a grad student I noticed something about a construction my adviser had come up with. He was working on a book at the time (with several coauthors) and included the result, attributing it to me by name.
Actually, that came out around the same time as another mention I got: While I was working on my thesis we had a visitor who was working on something closely related. He used the result of my thesis in a paper, mentioning me by name because the result wasn’t published, yet. I’m not actually sure which appeared first, the book or this paper.
Not completely on topic, but fun: Recently, a collaborator in Korea was in his school’s library looking for something when he noticed a familiar name on a book nearby. It was a copy of a textbook on which I’m a coauthor. He took a picture and emailed it to me. I think that’s the farthest away I’ve heard of the textbook appearing.
It had not occurred to me until seeing this thread that you could look up who had cited your journal articles.
I looked up a couple of my enormous output of published medical works* and by gum, there are a dozen citations by equally obscure people, one of which is in a book that I’m sure must have sold at least 20 copies by now. I feel like…Navin Johnson!
I remember checking the cites to my papers in Science Citation Index way back when. As in “published in large tomes on paper.” There were a surprising number of cites. I added them up and listed this in a contract renewal thing. I had more cites than most, if not all, other members of my department. Of course that didn’t mean a thing. ($ does, despite the explicit statement in the Faculty Handbook to the opposite.)
I only know of limited citation listings in Computer Science culled from TeX biblio listings. Is there a major citation index online with good coverage for free? (Perhaps via some library-related service?)
