Nature: How many papers really end up without a single citation

[Greg Bernhardt]

The science that’s never been cited.
Nature investigates how many papers really end up without a single citation.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-017-08404-0

One widely repeated estimate, reported in a controversial article in Science in 1990, suggests that more than half of all academic articles remain uncited five years after their publication2. Scientists genuinely fret about this issue, says Jevin West, an information scientist at the University of Washington in Seattle who studies large-scale patterns in research literature. After all, citations are widely recognized as a standard measure of academic influence: a marker that work not only has been read, but also has proved useful to later studies. Researchers worry that high rates of uncitedness point to a heap of useless or irrelevant research. “I can’t tell you how many people over dinner have asked me: ‘How much of the literature is never cited?’” West says.

Publishing by--and for?--the numbers
http://science.sciencemag.org/content/250/4986/1331

 

[Vanadium 50]

My experience is different. I have (out of more than 1000 publications), 4 with zero cites. Of the 4, 1 is in the list by mistake (it was never published and exists only on preprint servers), 2 are less than 5 years old, and 1 is legitimately in that category. That last one is a very detailed description of the construction techniques used foe a particular instrument. I wwouldn't expect it to get cited - if it is useful in building a future instrument, I expect they would just do it.

In the other direction, 10% of my papers generate 50% of my citations.

Finally, one of my least-cited papers is one I am proudest of: it was a measurement that definitely excluded a particular family of theories. Why was it not cited more? Because by settling the issue, people stopped working on these kinds of theories. So it got only 47 cites.