Fair warning: no real significance here, just a little fun–engendered by Robin Hastings’ Facebook status giving me a shout-out for being mentioned in one of her LIS textbooks (a reference based on “Here’s the Content–Where’s the Context?” in the March 2000 American Libraries–an article, not a column).
Which, for some reason, caused me to go look at my Google Scholar page, for the first time in a while. (I dunno if that link will work. If not, not.)
I’m sure every scholar with even half an ego knows that Google Scholar uses the term “scholar” loosely, since neither the things it cites nor the citations it counts are in any way limited to Proper Scholarly Literature. Which is a good thing for me, as I’ve only written two or three refereed articles in my entire career, and I’m not even sure they’re among the–good grief, 479!–items listed on that Google Scholar page. (Really? 479? I guess so; apparently, even some Cites & Insights issues are included, as are many of my columns and even CD-ROM reviews. I just now deleted one, from the second page of 20 each, that’s by some other W. Crawford.)
Anyway: it’s an interesting list, in its own way. I have no idea what h-index and i10-index scores are supposed to mean, but mine are 17 and 21 respectively (or 7 and 4 since 2010), based, I guess, in part on 1,378 citations (298 since 2010–and I find the latter much more gratifying, since it means I’m not entirely old news.)
Then I get down to “what gets cited most?”
First, not surprisingly, I can’t entirely count as my own: Future Libraries: Dreams, Madness & Reality with 355(!) citations. I’d guess Michael Gorman’s fans are directly responsible for many of those. Still, I’ll take it.
Second, not too surprisingly: Library 2.0 and “Library 2.0” (Cites & Insights 6:2) with 120 citations.
Third, an oldie but a goodie, MARC for Library Use, with 97 citations.
The rest are in some ways more interesting, because some of them are a trifle unexpected–e.g., #5, Being Analog: Creating Tomorrow’s Libraries, and #10, “Starting Over: Current Issues in Online Catalog User Interfce Design” from a 1992 issue of Information Technology and Libraries. Come to think of it, #8 may be surprising as well: Patron Access: Issues for Online Catalogs–a book that was, I believe, important and current when it was written, in 1987. Today, not so much. That five of the citations (of 32) are from the 21st century, and that two are within the past three years, is a little surprising.
Gratifying, in its own way: #4: “Paper Persists: Why Physical Library Collections Still Matter,” from Online in 1998. That date and the fact that the article was needed tell you something: if a few librarians are now complaining that they don’t want to read any more articles about print being superior to digital, you might remind them that for twenty years or more we’ve been reading seemingly endless accounts of how all-digital was inevitable, from N. Negroponte on down. (Being Digital appeared in 1995. The Wikipedia article on the book is “neutral” in that special way that start-class articles about Digital Gurus and their work tend to be…)
Enough; I’m certainly not going to slog through citations for the 100+ items that actually have citations.
