Topcites Forecast: How Many String Papers Will Get 100+ Citations in 2006?

[marcus]

It used to be that in any given year a dozen or more recent string papers would get 100+ citations.

So we had a forecast poll last year. I guessed that 8 would, but that turned out to be over-optimistic. I forget whose prediction was closest.
Oh here, this shows:
https://www.physicsforums.com/poll.php?do=showresults&pollid=580

It looks like notevenwrong (Peter Woit), Gokul, ohwilleke, Chronos, and others were the ones who predicted right.

https://www.physicsforums.com/showthread.php?t=114925

You check up by going here
http://www.slac.stanford.edu/library/topcites/2005/annual.shtml

It is a way of gauging the current overall vitality of string research and how influential it is and how this changes over time.

In case anyone wants to guess, I put a poll. Right now I don't have any idea what I would forecast at this point. [edit: now predicting 4]

Our convention is that "recent" means in the last 5 years. So we are guessing how many string papers published 2002-2006 will turn out to get 100 or more citations during 2006, and the SPIRES data to show whose guess was right will presumably be posted as usual around March of 2007 at a url like this:
http://www.slac.stanford.edu/library/topcites/2006/annual.shtml

 

[marcus]

there was some discussion here
https://www.physicsforums.com/showthread.php?t=81739

In year 2000 there were 21 recent string papers that broke 100 cites

In year 2004 there were 8.

In year 2005 there were 4.

Now we are guessing about 2006.

there have to be several----just kidding about the "zero" possibility in the poll.

One can be sure that the KKLT paper of 2003 will break 100 cites this year---it ALREADY HAS! that was and continues to be a very important paper.

Another paper very likely to garner 100+ cites this year is Berenstein et al. We can check it out. It might already have passed 100.
http://arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/0202021

Another is Kachru et al. http://arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/0308055
(I count 60-some cites with an 06 arxiv number, and the year is far from over!)

 

[marcus]

We have 7 forecasts recorded so far!

Etera predicts 8 or more highly cited recent papers, like the old days
Arivero and I predict there will be 4, like last year
Chronos and Gokul43201 say there will be 3 this year.

Energex and Francesca guess 2.

be it hereby noted that these are the first 7 people to register their guesses

 

[marcus]

Yay, more people have joined the poll!
We now have 11 predictions.

https://www.physicsforums.com/poll.php?do=showresults&pollid=917

some people (two: etera and torsten) have made joke predictions, or so I think. there is no way we could have either zero or eight recent highly cited papers.

Even though it is delightful to contemplate either way, or else slightly crazy, we must only pay attention to the really serious forecasters.
Like Francesca. She predicts two recent (2002-2006) papers will get 100+ citations. this could happen. maybe she can already say which ones they will be!

======edit========

Also Gokul, my impression is that Gokul is very knowledgeable. Gokul, you predict that 3 papers will be highly cited---could you say at this point which ones they might be?

 

[arivero]

I just checked the topcite 50+ and the only one in 2006 for this forum is a MOND one:

http://arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/0601213

A honorable mention, although, goes to a end-2nd-quarter paper that seems to try to look at MOND and noncommunativities from the string point of view:

http://arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/0605113

 

[marcus]

arivero, thanks for reminding me about this 2006 topcites forecast poll.

IIRC you (and I also) predicted that 4 recent stringy papers would get 100+ citations this year
I just checked and found that two ALREADY HAVE passed the 100 cites mark.KKLT already has over 150
http://arxiv.org/hep-th/0301240

Berenstein et. al. on PP-waves has around 110
http://arxiv.org/hep-th/0202021

Kachru et. al. on inflation and string theory not there yet (only has around 70 so far)
http://arxiv.org/hep-th/0308055

Witten on strings on twistor space has around 70 so far
http://arxiv.org/hep-th/0312171

If this year would have only 10 months and would end today then probably FRANCESCA WOULD BE THE WINNER.
Because she predicted that two papers would get 100+ cites.

=======
The poll was limited to recent papers----appearing in the past 5 years (2002-2006) so for instance these papers were not AFAIK in the running
Douglas, Nekrasov on Non-commutative field theory http://arxiv.org/hep-th/0106048
Giddings et. al on Flux compactifications http://arxiv.org/hep-th/0105097
because they appeared in 2001.
==========================================

Arivero the performance of that MOND review article is remarkable!
I followed the link you gave and found that even though it just appeared this year it has already been cited 64 times, just in 2006.

http://arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/0601213
Introduction to Modified Gravity and Gravitational Alternative for Dark Energy
S. Nojiri, S.D. Odintsov
21 pages, lectures for 42 Karpacz Winter School on Theoretical Physics

"We review various modified gravities considered as gravitational alternative for dark energy..."

64 citations in one year (actually 10 months) would already look very good on the part, for example, of a string paper.
How is it now that something off-the-beaten-track is getting so much notice, like this modified Newton to make dark energy unnecessary?

I think you mentioned having attended the Karpacz workshop as early as sometime in 1990s.

footnote: I went back here
https://www.physicsforums.com/showthread.php?p=942609#post942609
to see how many recent stringy papers got 100+ last year and it was 4

 

[arivero]

I think you mentioned having attended the Karpacz workshop as early as sometime in 1990s.

Indeed. At that time it consisted of three small houses in a patch of terrain in the mountain; the dinner room was in one of them, the seminar room in another, so everyone was forced to cross the snow at least a couple times every day

 

[marcus]

Indeed. At that time it consisted of three small houses in a patch of terrain in the mountain; the dinner room was in one of them, the seminar room in another, so everyone was forced to cross the snow at least a couple times every day

I get the impression that the Poles are proud of their snow.

BTW it is nearing time when we can check to see how the citation counts came out.

====================
hmm
I see so far less than 85 cites for the Kachru et al inflation paper
http://arxiv.org/cits/hep-th/0308055?skip=75&db=spires

and also less than 85 for the Witten twistor paper
http://arxiv.org/cits/hep-th/0312171?skip=75&db=spires

perhaps the librarians are on holiday and there are more cites that the system has not yet accumulated
I don't know of any other candidates for 100+, so that means to date we have only two 100+ recent papers confirmed
and unless things change Francesca appears to be the best guesser!

Not to mention dmoravec and Energex42. But it is still to early to congratulate the astute (or lucky) people since not all the results are in for the year.

 

[arivero]

I see so far less than 85 cites for the Kachru et al inflation paper
http://arxiv.org/cits/hep-th/0308055?skip=75&db=spires

and also less than 85 for the Witten twistor paper
http://arxiv.org/cits/hep-th/0312171?skip=75&db=spires

Do you mean, new cites? Or total?

 

[marcus]

Do you mean, new cites? Or total?

I mean cites that occurred this year.
"How many recent (2002-2006) string papers will get 100+ cites in 2006?"

which means new, not lifetime total. I don't know any way to make a search engine find those papers.
You have been able to get stats in the past, not sure how. The easy thing to get, which I understand how
to do, is papers with lifetime total more than some amount.
=====================
to put the citations in context we should keep track of any trend in total number of stringy research papers being published each year.

this search uses the keywords (superstring, M-theory, brane, worldsheet, heterotic, AdS/CFT)

2003: http://adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/n...txt_wgt=YES&ttl_sco=YES&txt_sco=YES&version=1

2004: http://adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/n...txt_wgt=YES&ttl_sco=YES&txt_sco=YES&version=1

2005: http://adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/n...txt_wgt=YES&ttl_sco=YES&txt_sco=YES&version=1

2006: http://adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/n...txt_wgt=YES&ttl_sco=YES&txt_sco=YES&version=1

the last is still accumulating publications since we still have the rest of December to go---ths is updated as of 18 December
(additional entries may also show up in earlier years if they come to the librarian's attention belatedly)

3246, 3153, 3132, 2953

when everything is in for 2006 we can expect it to be roughly comparable to the other years 2003-2005.
Things look approximately steady. The raw publication rate is either not declining, or is declining very slightly.

The change in QUALITY as indicated by citations is considerably more marked, for some reason, than the variation in raw quantity.

 

[notevenwrong]

I just voted for "3", but this is kind of unfair since the year is almost over, and I think I've figured out how to fairly accurately use SPIRES to count citations by year. Just click on the link that gives the list of papers that cite the given paper, then add "and date 2006" to the search, you'll get the list of papers from 2006 that cite the given paper. Also useful for figuring out which papers might have high citation rates during 2006 is to use the "find topcites *" search, where * is 50+ 100+ 250+ 500+.

The three papers are

KKLT (233 citations so far in 2006)
Berenstein et. al. (127 citations so far)

and, with a significantly larger number of citations this year than last:

Susskind's "Anthropic Landscape" paper with 107 citations so far.