Mismatch between citations and chemists' expectations
Survey highlights difference between paper metrics and the actual significance of research
The studies chemistry researchers perceive to be the most important in their field are not always the ones that get cited the most, according to a new survey.
An interdisciplinary US team examined how accurately a batch of over 350 chemists could estimate the impact of papers published in a 2003 issue of the Journal of the American Chemical Society (JACS). It found that the importance of a research article is only partly represented by the number of citations it accumulates.