Re: st: RE: how to be -assert-ive

[Stas Kolenikov <skolenik@gmail.com>]

On Thu, Sep 30, 2010 at 8:20 AM, Nick Cox <n.j.cox@durham.ac.uk> wrote:
> I doubt that citations are a very good measure of utility for Stata Journal Tips. People can use an Stata feature, sometimes very frequently, without it seeming obvious that it should be cited in a published paper, particularly if the focus of that paper is not itself the use of Stata.

I did cite the certification paper in my SJ paper on -confa- when I
discussed the tests I created for it. And I personally think that
every paper in SJ that offers a new ado file should cite it. And a
paper describing an update to the existing package should cite it,
too, and make sure that the old tests ran OK.

I found the book on tips quite useful, too. Flipping through pages
reminds me of certain features that I should've known but strongly
forgotten, or gets to something quite useful I did not know.

I guess the most cited SJ paper is Baum, Schaffer and Stillman (2003;
http://www.stata-journal.com/sjpdf.html?articlenum=st0030) for whom
Scholar Google reports 600+ citations. That's a very impressive
result, no matter what discipline and what journal you'd be looking
at. I know of a paper with ~12000 citations (every time I Scholar
Google it, the number changes, and sometimes it even goes down), and
ironically that's an example of what NJC referred to as bending
backwards to poor computations.

Finally, with all the pun, two citations for a 3-page paper over 10
years is not a very bad result. I imagine about half regular papers in
economics journal get as many citations over the same period of time.
Besides somehow I don't have a terribly strong feeling that WG's
tenure decision was hanging on receiving an extra citation from an old
paper 8-).

-- 
Stas Kolenikov, also found at http://stas.kolenikov.name
Small print: I use this email account for mailing lists only.

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