A mathematical theory of citing, Simkin, MV; Roychowdhury, VP, JOURNAL OF THE AMERICAN SOCIETY FOR INFORMATION SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY 58 (11). SEP 2007. p.1661-1673

Thu Dec 6 21:03:35 EST 2007

Dear Quentin; I do not know what mistakes you are referring to. However, I seem to recall that when this theory was first proposed to much fanfare I discovered that the authors did not seem to know anything about how the Science Citation Index is compiled and therefore made the assumption that any of the authors who were listed in SCI as having cited a particular paper, used the same reference when in fact that was not the case. The SCI unification systems may give that impression, but if the system happens to 
select a variant of  the standard citation as the heading, you could easily get the impression that all of the citing authors used the same sequence of characters. Therefore you could erroneously conclude that all the citing authors copied that variant.
The only way you can determine whether an erroneous citation was copied is to go to the original citing paper. The effort required is substantial especially for well cited papers. Furthermore, just because someone uses a surrogate paper or review to identify a reference citation does not mean it was not read. It is just a quick and sometimes dirty way to identify a paper you once read and need to cite.  Eugene Garfield

-----Original Message-----
From: ASIS&T Special Interest Group on Metrics [mailto:SIGMETRICS at LISTSERV.UTK.EDU] On Behalf Of Quentin L. Burrell
Sent: Thursday, December 06, 2007 3:48 PM
To: SIGMETRICS at LISTSERV.UTK.EDU
Subject: Re: [SIGMETRICS] A mathematical theory of citing, Simkin, MV; Roychowdhury, VP, JOURNAL OF THE AMERICAN SOCIETY FOR INFORMATION SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY 58 (11). SEP 2007. p.1661-1673

The original work was flawed in that there were elementary, yet crucial, 
arithmetic mistakes that led the authors to conclude that copying was the 
only explanation. It was most certainly not.

Their subsequent work has been less dogmatic, not claiming the result to 
have been proved or even demonstrated, merely that their model is consistent 
with observed results. In the JASIST paper they even concede - somewhat 
begrudgingly! - that there are other approaches.

It is "a model" not "the model".

Quentin

**********************************
Dr Quentin L Burrell
Isle of Man International Business School
The Nunnery
Old Castletown Road
Douglas
Isle of Man IM2 1QB
via United Kingdom
www.ibs.ac.im

***********************************

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Pikas, Christina K." <Christina.Pikas at JHUAPL.EDU>
To: <SIGMETRICS at LISTSERV.UTK.EDU>
Sent: Thursday, December 06, 2007 5:41 PM
Subject: Re: [SIGMETRICS] A mathematical theory of citing, Simkin, MV; 
Roychowdhury, VP, JOURNAL OF THE AMERICAN SOCIETY FOR INFORMATION SCIENCE 
AND TECHNOLOGY 58 (11). SEP 2007. p.1661-1673

> Adminstrative info for SIGMETRICS (for example unsubscribe): 
> http://web.utk.edu/~gwhitney/sigmetrics.html
>
> Actually, that was in a paper a couple of years ago posted to ArXiv -- 
> it was the only way to explain the propagation of obvious critical 
> errors; that is, errors that:
> - would prevent the easy retrieval of the article (switched page
> numbers)
> - were fairly uncommon or would be fairly unlikely to happen 
> repeatedly by chance alone
>
> Ah, but you're being tongue in cheek?
>
>
> Christina K. Pikas
>
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: ASIS&T Special Interest Group on Metrics 
> [mailto:SIGMETRICS at listserv.utk.edu] On Behalf Of Morris, Steven (BA)
> Sent: Thursday, December 06, 2007 12:08 PM
> To: SIGMETRICS at listserv.utk.edu
> Subject: Re: [SIGMETRICS] A mathematical theory of citing, Simkin, MV; 
> Roychowdhury, VP, JOURNAL OF THE AMERICAN SOCIETY FOR INFORMATION 
> SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY 58 (11). SEP 2007. p.1661-1673
>
> Adminstrative info for SIGMETRICS (for example unsubscribe): 
> http://web.utk.edu/~gwhitney/sigmetrics.html
>
> Of all the airy-fairy network growth models that physicists have 
> inflicted upon us, in my opinion this 'reference copying' model takes 
> the cake.
>
> Does anyone out there really believe that researchers blindly copy 
> references into their papers?
>
>
> Steve Morris
> Houston
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: ASIS&T Special Interest Group on Metrics 
> [mailto:SIGMETRICS at listserv.utk.edu] On Behalf Of Eugene Garfield
> Sent: Thursday, December 06, 2007 10:07 AM
> To: SIGMETRICS at listserv.utk.edu
> Subject: [SIGMETRICS] A mathematical theory of citing, Simkin, MV; 
> Roychowdhury, VP, JOURNAL OF THE AMERICAN SOCIETY FOR INFORMATION 
> SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY 58 (11). SEP 2007. p.1661-1673
>
> Adminstrative info for SIGMETRICS (for example unsubscribe): 
> http://web.utk.edu/~gwhitney/sigmetrics.html
>
> E-mail Address: simkin at ee.ucla.edu
>
> Author(s): Simkin, MV (Simkin, Mikhail V.); Roychowdhury, VP 
> (Roychowdhury, Vwani P.)
>
> Title: A mathematical theory of citing
>
> Source: JOURNAL OF THE AMERICAN SOCIETY FOR INFORMATION SCIENCE AND 
> TECHNOLOGY, 58 (11): 1661-1673 SEP 2007
>
> Language: English
> Document Type: Article
>
> Keywords Plus: NETWORKS; EVOLUTION; MODEL; CRITICALITY; ALLELES; 
> CHANCE
>
> Cited Reference Count: 50
> Times Cited: 0
>
> Publisher: JOHN WILEY & SONS INC
> Publisher Address: 111 RIVER ST, HOBOKEN, NJ 07030 USA
>
> ISSN: 1532-2882
>
> Subject Category: Computer Science, Information Systems; Information 
> Science & Library Science
>
> Abstract: Recently we proposed a model in which when a scientist 
> writes a manuscript, he picks up several random papers, cites them, 
> and also copies a fraction of their references. The model was 
> stimulated by our finding that a majority of scientific citations are 
> copied from the lists of references used in other papers. It accounted 
> quantitatively for several
>
> properties of empirically observed distribution of citations; however, 
> important features such as power-law distributions of citations to 
> papers published during the same year and the fact that the average 
> rate of citing decreases with aging of a paper were not accounted for 
> by that model. Here, we propose a modified model: When a scientist 
> writes a manuscript, he picks up several random recent papers, cites 
> them, and also copies some of their references. The difference with 
> the original model is the word recent. We solve the model using 
> methods of the theory of branching processes, and find that it can 
> explain the aforementioned features of citation distribution, which 
> our original model could not account for. The model also can explain 
> "sleeping beauties in science;" that is, papers that are little cited 
> for a decade or so and later "awaken" and get many citations. Although 
> much can be understood from purely random models, we find that to 
> obtain a good quantitative agreement with empirical citation data, one 
> must introduce Darwinian fitness parameter for the papers.
>
> Addresses: Univ Calif Los Angeles, Dept Elect Engn, Los Angeles, CA 
> 90095 USA
>
> Reprint Address: Simkin, MV, Univ Calif Los Angeles, Dept Elect Engn, 
> Los Angeles, CA 90095 USA.
>
> E-mail Address: simkin at ee.ucla.edu; vwani at ee.ucla.edu
>
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