Originally posted on 31 Oct 2014
This week on Nature.com: an overview of the 100 top cited papers, according to Thompson Reuters’ web of science database. Surprisingly, publications on nobel-prize winning findings aren’t at the top.
Most of the top 100 most cited papers, are actually methods papers.
Which leads to the conclusion, that if you want to write an amazing paper that will send your author index skyrocketing, you should find a new, efficient and ground-breaking protocol that will be used by everybody in your field. And don’t work in a small niche field, that won’t help you one bit.
So, invent a new methodology everybody will just have to use, wait a few decades, and bam, you might get yourself a first-author spot on the honour list of top-cited papers in the world. Wouldn’t that be great?
Next post, how to win a Nobel Prize, or something else on the long list of things that I haven’t achieved and never will.
Rephrase: Next post, how to win a Nobel Prize, or something else on the long list of things that I haven’t achieved yet.
On a side note, I recently came across a bunch of “how to” articles titled “10 simple rules“, most of them written by Philip E. Bourne. Quite an entertaining read for during your coffee
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