Is Citation Count a Legitimate Indicator of Scientific Impact? A Case Study of Upper (1974) “The Unsuccessful Self-Treatment of a Case of Writer’s Block” and Its Derivatives

Andy Wai Kan Yeung ()
Additional contact information
Andy Wai Kan Yeung: Oral and Maxillofacial Radiology, Applied Oral Sciences and Community Dental Care, Faculty of Dentistry, University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China

Publications, 2024, vol. 12, issue 4, 1-10

Abstract: The work by Upper (1974) was a blank paper. Multiple replication studies were published. This work examined the number of citations received by these papers, and manually checked the citing papers to determine why they made the citations. The Dimensions literature database was queried with the search string: (unsuccessful treatment writer’s block). The search yielded 14 articles, two of which were irrelevant and excluded. The 12 papers remained after screening included the original study by Upper (1974), nine replication studies, one review, and one meta-analysis. The original work received 43 citations, but related works had fewer than 10 citations each. One fourth of citations of Upper (1974) were being satiric on “nothing” or “precise” from papers dealing with unrelated concepts, and five citations were deemed erroneous/digressed. One citation was made to acknowledge the reviewer’s comments to Upper (1974), which did not involve Upper’s own ideas. This work exposed a scenario where there were limitations of using citation count as the only metric to gauge scientific impact of journal articles.

Keywords: citation analysis; citation behavior; blank paper; writer’s block (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: A2 D83 L82 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2304-6775/12/4/35/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2304-6775/12/4/35/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jpubli:v:12:y:2024:i:4:p:35-:d:1498992

Access Statistics for this article

Publications is currently edited by Ms. Jennifer Zhang

More articles in Publications from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().