Uncited research

This article raises, for me at least, the interesting question of whether the large amount of research that remains uncited in medical/scientific literature is a good thing, a bad thing, or a neutral thing.  I did a little more reading, and found some other posts on the topic.

This blog post details the scope of the issue:

Most scientific articles get little to no attention (Van Dalen and Klamer 2005). One study found that 47 percent of articles catalogued by the Institute for Scientific Information have never been cited, and more than 80 percent have been cited less than 10 times (Redner 1998). Articles in the median social science journal, on average, get only 0.5 citations within two years of publication (Klamer and Dalen 2002). The mean number of citations per article in mathematics, physics, and environmental science journals is probably less than 1 (Mansilla et al. 2007).

A post in the Chronicle details the damaging impact on academia:

As a result, instead of contributing to knowledge in various disciplines, the increasing number of low-cited publications only adds to the bulk of words and numbers to be reviewed. Even if read, many articles that are not cited by anyone would seem to contain little useful information. The avalanche of ignored research has a profoundly damaging effect on the enterprise as a whole… The impact strikes at the heart of academe…

Too much publication raises the refereeing load on leading practitioners—often beyond their capacity to cope…

The productivity climate raises the demand on younger researchers..

The pace of publication accelerates, encouraging projects that don’t require extensive, time-consuming inquiry and evidence gathering. For example, instead of efficiently combining multiple results into one paper, professors often put all their students’ names on multiple papers, each of which contains part of the findings of just one of the students. One famous physicist has some 450 articles using such a strategy…

In addition, as more and more journals are initiated… libraries struggle to pay the notoriously high subscription costs.

The amount of material one must read to conduct a reasonable review of a topic keeps growing. Younger scholars can’t ignore any of it—they never know when a reviewer or an interviewer might have written something disregarded—and so they waste precious months reviewing a pool of articles that may lead nowhere.

(I suggest reading the whole article.)

I think there’s both an existential issue and a practical one.  There will always be research that turns out, in retrospect, to have not been very relevant, and so the elimination of uncited papers is not actually a desirable goal, even if it were a reasonable one.  So then how much uncited work is ideal?

That said, the overall, practical critique, that there is something messed up with our culture if the majority of what we produce remains uncited, is sound.  Whatever the ideal amount is, it’s not 60%.