Should you cite operational numerical weather prediction models?

A colleague asked me a question about whether it was necessary to cite any published literature on numerical weather prediction models in your scientific papers. My response follows. I don’t have a rule, and the American Meteorological Society doesn’t either. I’ve seen papers with these models cited and other papers where they are not. My […]

Why do good papers get few citations?

Have you ever looked at Google Scholar or your ISI Web of Science scores and wondered who was citing your papers and why were they citing them? After thinking a bit more about why certain papers on my CV have received as much or as little attention through citation, I decided it was time to […]

The Importance of Not Being Cited

This title comes from a 1973 paper in Current Contents by Eugene Garfield called “Uncitedness III—The Importance of Not Being Cited”. In there, Garfield talks about three reasons why papers may not be cited. I. “the uncitedness of the mediocre, the unintelligible, the irrelevant, the eccentric.” II. “the uncitedness of the meritorious but undiscovered or […]

A note on good research practice: Dooley (2013)

An editorial in the International Journal of Greenhouse Gas Control is entitled “A note on good research practice.” Dooley states: By far the most common issue we editors of this journal are seeing in terms of poor scientific practice in submissions is the failure to appropriately cite the work of others. Sadly, we see numerous […]

Automation of literature reviews

A recently published paper in Scientometrics raises the specter of an automated tool that would search through existing citations and “facilitate novices to perform tasks that are usually carried out by trained professionals.” The tool was then used for students to create literature reviews and these were submitted to conferences. The tool was so successful, […]

The importance of proper citation

Just recently I discovered a published article that neglected to cite the whole field of the topic that they were investigating. The article did have citations to the statistical methods and other papers that were related to their work, but not a single paper had been cited that had performed the same statistical analyses that […]

When should you cite a paper?

3 month thesis by James Hayton has a free guide that you can sign up to receive called “The Short Guide to Writing Fast.” Inside I found this concise quote about when you should cite a paper (p. 20): You should only cite a paper… • To support one of your arguments • To provide […]

Check your reference list!

A recent paper published in Scientometrics by Robert Lopresti looks at the accuracy of citations in the five leading environmental science journals. Lopresti found that 24.4% of the references in the reference list had errors in them. Almost half of the errors were in the authors names. Almost 30% of the errors were in the […]

Reference list style guides

As an author, creating and double-checking reference lists in your manuscript are a hassle. Chances are if you make a mistake, a reader will go looking for that source and be stymied by a wrong year or incorrect page number. On top of the problems of accuracy, different journals require different formats for their reference […]