re: #287 Mark Winter

Don’t forget that you meet a lot of people, too, or they get recommended to you. So the prestige of the journal isn’t everything.

We are exaggerating the “publish or perish” principle a little. Quantity does not always mean quality.

Of course you are right. I am not trying at all to say that the process is perfect. Every scientist has a story of a great paper that was killed by an idiot reviewer and every year dozens of less than amazing papers get out there because someone needed to get something out there.

However, on the other hand, in average, overall, it is a good rule of thumb that a paper with hundreds of citations - particularly hundreds of citations in branching applications is likely to be as true while the one with no citations from an obscure journal is at best unproven at first glance.

Again it may be that that obscure journal paper with no citations is exactly the piece you needed for your own research. It may even be like Lie and Gell Mann… however, if you are giving a general guideline and talking about sheer probabilities of what is more likely to be crap and what isn’t, I think I am making a valid argument.

For those who don’t know the story BTW, Sophus Lie was a mathematician in the 19th century. He wrote the paper on a subject called group theory. It was known to algebraists, (a type of mathematician) but few others until the 1960’s. Almost a century later, Gell Mann sense a certain pattern in particle physics. He went to the math Dept at Cal Tech to ask about it. They said read Lie. He did. Ever after, Lie’s math was central to particle theory. That is the best case I know of, of a paper being huge much after it’s time. I am sure there are other examples, but it is the first that comes to mind.