Organization Monkey

inspired by the self improvement post over at scatterplot, in which the author describes her attempt to read the top 25 most cited articles in sociology, i went in search of the same in information & library science.  i ended up finding a list in the 2009 article by levitt and thelwall, which ranks the top 82 in the field based on disciplinarity, annual citation patterns, and first author citation profiles.   these are the 5 that top the list:

1. Hu M (1962) Visual-Pattern Recognition by Moment Invariants
2. Davis FD (1989) Perceived Usefulness, Perceived Ease of Use, and User Acceptance of Information Technology
3. Pawlak Z (1982) Rough Sets
4. Gruber TR (1993) A Translation Approach to Portable Ontology Specifications
5. Deerwester S, Dumais ST, Furnas GW, et al. (1990) Indexing by Latent Semantic Analysis

i read a lot and was surprised by how many articles in this list i haven’t seen before.  it makes me wonder if “top citations” equal “essential reading.”  what do YOU think?  what would you consider essential articles in our field?  would these 5 make your list?

Levitt, J.M., and Mike Thelwall (2009). The Most Highly Cited Library and Information Science Articles: Interdisciplinarity, First Authors and Citation Patterns. Scientometrics 78:1, pp. 45-67. DOI: 10.1007/s11192-007-1927-1

i’m reading through an article about how high energy physicists organize themselves to do their work, with the traditional model of publishing as the surprising second step, the first step being sharing via pre-print environments such as arXiv.  though the pre-print environment helps them do their work quickly, they still value the second step of publishing in journals.

SPIRES data shows that … papers submitted to arXiv and not published in a journal have an impact factor approximately 5 times lower than that of papers submitted to arXiv and published in a journal.  Peer-review seems to result in increased citation, indicating that the field still values quality control, in addition to other functions provided by journals such as permanent archiving.

“Organizing a research community with SPIRES: Where repositories, scientists and publishers meet”
Travis C. Brooks
Information Services & Use 29 (2009) 91-96.