From: Joao Magalhaes (jpnitya@skynet.be)
Date: Sat Jul 27 2002 - 11:42:01 MDT
At 08:02 25-07-2002 +0200, you wrote:
>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.
But how can you use it to predict breakthroughs? I mean, you will need to
wait years to have an idea of the impact of a paper. Perhaps a better
measure would be to calculate the diversity of papers. For example, we now
have fields -- e.g. bioinformatics -- that we didn't have a 10 or 20 years
ago. Of course the question is how to calculate scientific diversity?
Perhaps we can count the number of different course at Universities? Now
I'm sure that has increased in recent years. A higher degree of
specialization might lead to new discoveries in broader fields. Anyway, I'm
starting to think that having a faith in future technological progress is
no different than having a faith in God. Now I feel depressed.
>GCS/M/S/O d++ -p+ c++++ !l u+ e++ m++ s+/+ n--- h+/* f+ g+ w++ t+ r+ !y
What on earth is this?
All the best.
Joao Magalhaes (joao.magalhaes@fundp.ac.be)
Website on Aging: http://www.senescence.info
Reason's Triumph: http://www.jpreason.com
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