“90% of papers published in academic journals are never cited.” This damning statistic from a 2007 overview of citation analysis recently darted about cyberspace. A similar statistic had made the rounds in 2010 but that time it was about 60 percent of social and natural science articles that were said to be uncited. Neither statistic came with a link to supporting academic research papers.
This article by Dahlia Remler originally appeared on her personal blog, DahliaRemler.com, under the title “Are 90% of academic papers really never cited? Searching citations about academic citations reveals the good, the bad and the ugly.” It appears here with her permission.
That lack of support was a problem for me. I did not doubt the basic truth that many academic papers are uncited. But to be sure 90 percent was not urban legend and to learn the context and caveats, I needed to find the original research paper. I was not the only one who wanted the supporting evidence. So, I dove into Google scholar, searching the disparaged academic literature for articles on academic citation rates.
Many academic articles are never cited, although I could not find any study with a result as high as 90 percent. Non-citation rates vary enormously by field. “Only” 12 percent of medicine articles are not cited, compared to about 82 percent (!) for the humanities. It’s 27 percent for natural sciences and 32 percent for social sciences (cite). For everything except humanities, those numbers are far from 90 percent but they are still high: One third of social science articles go uncited!
The uncited rate is also sensitive to other factors: how long a window is used to check for citations (e.g., five years); when the article whose cites are being counted was published (2000s or 1990s); and what counts as a citation. The uncited rates I gave as “the” rates are really five-year citation rates in all Thomson’s Web of Science journals, and that is not comprehensive. The details of whether to include self-citations, non-academic articles, and so on, also matter.
For everything except humanities, those numbers are far from 90 percent but they are still high: One third of social science articles go uncited!
Meho explained the 90 percent by email, “The first paragraph of the article was written by the editor of the magazine and not me. If I recall correctly, he got the figures from/during a lecture he attended in the UK in which the presenter claimed that 90% of the published papers goes uncited and 50% remains unread other than by authors/referees/editors.” Meho noted that the 90 percent figure was about right for the humanities but not other fields.
Academic publication needs fixing. Even the 12 percent uncited rate for medicine seems large to me, particularly given what medical research costs. The one-third rate for social science and more than 80 percent for humanities are really troubling. But whatever we do, let’s preserve somewhere what’s good about academic articles — full descriptions of methods and expert evaluation.
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I agree with Daniel_L – not cited doesn’t mean not read. I wish there was a way of accrediting papers for their use in undergraduate teaching that was equivalent to monitoring citations. Also in some areas 5 years is nothing – e.g. taxonomy and in others the work is out of date after even a few years.
If you go onto ISI and search how many articles are never cited, have a single citation or 2 citations, the results are quite consistent. Published articles that have zero citations range from 12-20%. Those with 2 or fewer range for 16-25%. The reason in part is that ISI includes meeting abstracts that are rarely cited (about 50% of the non-cited articles). Thus, articles that are never cited is 5-10% range, which is much lower than the 65-90% discussed in other parts of this discussion (this is primarily for the physical sciences). Certainly a thought provoking discsion!
I chose is 2000 to 2005. Of the 5 million papers in the humanities, sciences, engineering and medicine only about 500 000 are uncited until now. The citation rates increase (as low as 98 %) in some fields but in the humanities they are lower but still around 70 %.
Really appreciated this debunking effort. Always fascinating to see how a myth gets started, and to have someone dig out the references. Thanks !