Volume 2

Contemporary classics in the life sciences / edited by James T. Barrett.

Date:
©1986-
Catalogue details

Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)

Credit: Contemporary classics in the life sciences / edited by James T. Barrett. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    We are further refining our selection process by relying increasingly on research-front data derived from co-citation analysis. 4 An analysis of most- cited, or core, papers in a research front provides a more sensitive classification of subjects than does citation analysis by journal. Furthermore, and as a supplement to analytical methods, we ask for nominations from CC readers of works which they believe may qualify as Citation Classics. * * * * * We emphasize that this collection represents only a sample from the larger group we have identified as Citation Classics. About half of the authors invited to write commentaries actually do so. It follows, then, that the omission of a paper in this volume in no way signifies that it is not a Citation Classic. In the recent series of essays in CC devoted to the 1,000 most-cited papers in the SCI from 1961 to 1982, I identified papers for which we have received and published a Citation Classics ® commentary. 5 Parts nine and ten of this ten-part series will appear in CC within the next few months. In Appendix A of Volume One I have provided a sampling of 100 most-cited works for which we have not yet received a commentary. I hope that some of the authors of these Citation Classics will put pen to paper to reminisce and interpret the citation impact of their research. Still, a remarkable number of Nobel laureates and other scientists I have described as of Nobel class have contributed commentaries appearing in both volumes. These are balanced by many from hundreds of other scientists who have received rather little formal recognition for their contributions. ***** Finally, a word about those classics I have reported as rarely or only occasionally cited. I have taken to describing these papers and books as uncited classics, and there are many reasons for a classic work having few or no citations. I have already described how a relatively low citation count can qualify a work as a classic when weighed against its companions in other fields, and how we use a flexible, composite, and, we hope, intelligent algo rithm to compensate for this problem. It is most difficult, however, to com pensate for the lifetime citation counts of papers and books published as long as 50 years ago or even more recently than that. We know that most older works receive fewer citations since typically most citations are received in the first decade after publication. Moreover, the exponential growth of the literature has changed the significance of any fixed threshold. In 1955 we processed 80,000 papers in about 600 journals in the SCI, whereas in 1985 we indexed about 600,000 from 3,000 journals in the natural and physical sciences. These numbers reflect the rapid expansion of modern science, which in turn affects the size of bibliographies and the potential for citation impact. Furthermore, a recognized classic work may fail to be a Citation Classic because it has suffered what Robert K. Merton terms obliteration by in corporation: the obliteration of the source of ideas, methods, or findings,