Do the citations align with my research interests?

When citations are traded as the currency of science, it is difficult to estimate the price of a publication in advance or to understand it afterwards. One has the impression that precisely the topics that are frequently cited are those not in focus of one’s interest. In contrast, the work that one finds most interesting, might receive little attention. But maybe this perception is biased. To get a better understanding which articles are cited, I would like to give a short bibliometric evaluation of my google scholar citations in this post.

Method

The evaluation of the google scholar profile took place at the end of the year 2021. All articles with more than 10 citations (= i-index) were included (n = 50). For each article an average of 2 tags [range: 1-4] were assigned; for example, for the 2016 intelligence article The influence of item sampling on sex differences in knowledge tests the tags were gc, ACO, and gender assigned. In the next step, the citations per day were summed up and all tags that cumulatively received more than 120 citations were included in the report. Finally, the tags were grouped thematically into broader areas that were as homogeneous as possible.

Results

The citations can be assigned - in almost equal parts - to the following three areas: educational research, intelligence and assessment/ psychometrics. About 80% of the citations can be allocated in this way (the tag gender from above did not made it). It will be more interesting to see how the pie pieces change over time. Because such an evaluation involves a considerable time lap of several years (> 2 years), citations concerning educational research will presumably decrease in future years in relation to citations in the other areas. Perhaps the quite heterogeneous area of assessment/ psychometrics will split up in future rounds. Newer topics such as machine learning, which are mentioned in my current research statement, are not yet even present with a tag. So, I will keep an eye on the changes in citations and see if they align with my research interests.

Please drop me a line to tell me whether this post was informative or helpful in one way or another or just some idle navel-gazing.