From: Anders Sandberg (asa@nada.kth.se)
Date: Thu Jul 25 2002 - 00:02:49 MDT
On Tue, Jul 23, 2002 at 08:08:54PM +0200, Joao Magalhaes wrote:
> Counting publications is imperfect
> too. After all, only a small percentage of scientific papers leads to
> scientific revolutions; in other words, the great majority of papers being
> published are of little importance, so why count them?
I just got another idea about dealing with this, based on the Way of
Google. If you count the number of citations of a paper you get a
rough measure of its importance, and presumably the breakthroughs are
sets of linked widely cited papers. The problem with this is of course
that some breakthroughs take time to be recognized, so ideally they
should be evaluated frim time=infinity. So an approximation would be to
look for the number of widely cited papers after a set time, like two
or five years. If you count the number of papers with citation levels a
few quartiles above median, then you might get a kind of breakthrough
measure. Still hardly perfect, but calculable.
-- ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Anders Sandberg Towards Ascension! asa@nada.kth.se http://www.nada.kth.se/~asa/ GCS/M/S/O d++ -p+ c++++ !l u+ e++ m++ s+/+ n--- h+/* f+ g+ w++ t+ r+ !y
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