Confessions of a researchaholic

January 1, 2018

Bean-counting

Filed under: Real — liyiwei @ 12:39 pm
Tags: ,

This has been a widely discussed topic, but when it comes to academic publishing, focus on quality over quantity.

Take my PhD adviser as an example. At this moment, he has “only” 27 journal papers and 40 conference papers according to dblp, but nearly 40000 citations, including 10+ papers with 1000+ citations, according to Google scholar.
In comparison, there are people around his seniority and in our fields (for calibration) with roughly 10-times publications but only one-tenth of citations.
(Citation is one of the mostly commonly used measure for quality/impact, but others are possible, such as products.)

He once told me that the best timing to publish papers is when people beg us to do so (using Brain Curless’ first SIGGRAPH paper as an example). That is probably too extreme, but publishing low quality papers not only wastes our time (it is better to go out and play) but also dilutes our reputation.

2 Comments »

  1. Slightly tangential to your point, but I find it amusing that we’re two days into 2018 and Google Scholar says your advisor has racked up 63 citations for the year already. Not a bad start.

    Comment by Christopher Batty — January 2, 2018 @ 10:05 am | Reply

    • Citations for him keep on rolling in like compound interests for JP Morgan. 🙂

      Comment by liyiwei — January 2, 2018 @ 11:52 am | Reply


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