6

I am applying for a faculty position and want to highlight the quality of my publications.

Are any of the following appropriate in an academic CV:

  • citation rate (citations/year)
  • F1000 Recommendations
  • separating a 'monograph' from other 'articles'?

If so, how should I do it?

For example, should I just put the information parenthetically at the end of the reference, like:

Author (Year) Title, journal, vol, (> 10000 citations; 2 F1000 recommendations)

note: this question Should I put my h-index on my CV? is similar, and some of the ideas from that question apply here. However, it is not a strict duplicate because the h-index addressed there is a single metric for evaluating a candidate; my question relates to publication-level metrics, and which are useful to provide within the reference list of a CV.

Community
  • 1
Abe
  • 3,285
  • 6
  • 25
  • 42
  • 14
    I've never heard of F1000. If I haven't heard of it, others may not either, so they will find it odd if you cite it. – Wolfgang Bangerth Apr 03 '15 at 01:15
  • I do not know how recruitment people will interpret this but If you have to include it; maybe h-index is useful? – seteropere Apr 03 '15 at 02:40
  • 1
    Closely related: http://academia.stackexchange.com/q/17990/19607 – Kimball Apr 03 '15 at 04:49
  • @Kimball I would go as far as calling this a duplicate. – xLeitix Apr 03 '15 at 07:28
  • 1
    @CameronWilliams: I would hope no-one takes the citation number indicated by Google Scholar overly seriously, given that it is highly distorted - it includes "citations" found in bachelor theses and the like, if the university's digital library catalogue happens to be indexed. – O. R. Mapper Apr 03 '15 at 09:40
  • 2
    it includes "citations" found in bachelor theses and the like — So what? – JeffE Apr 03 '15 at 14:40
  • 4
    @O.R.Mapper: I actually find such citations just as useful as ones in journals. I shows real impact. – Wolfgang Bangerth Apr 03 '15 at 14:42
  • @WolfgangBangerth: So, all I have to do to lift a paper from 0 citations to 5 citations is offer 5 Bachelor theses that are somehow related to said paper, if only by a single sentence? – O. R. Mapper Apr 03 '15 at 15:49
  • 1
    @O.R.Mapper: Yes. But if your paper has only 5 citations, it's not particularly good anyway. If, on the other hand, your paper lists 100, 200, 300 citations on google scholar, then it is clear to me that you cannot have achieved that number by simply offering lots of Bachelor theses. – Wolfgang Bangerth Apr 04 '15 at 10:57
  • @WolfgangBangerth: The ratio of peer-reviewed papers compared to student theses among those citations should be checked in such cases, and it is of course very possible the high citation count points to a truly notable work. My concern is that student theses such as Bachelor theses, irrespective of whether the cited author offered/supervised them themselves or not, lack almost all of the "natural restrictions" that normally limit how many peer-reviewed works contain citations for a given paper. It just doesn't seem right to add up and compare numbers that are subject to very different factors. – O. R. Mapper Apr 04 '15 at 12:07
  • 1
    @O.R.Mapper: I guess we may simply have to agree to disagree here. I see the distinction, but I think real impact implies impact across the board. If a math paper is so abstract that it is simply never relevant to Bachelor theses, then it isn't relevant to anything outside the innermost core of academia either. To me, this seems like a problem. – Wolfgang Bangerth Apr 06 '15 at 15:09
  • @WolfgangBangerth F1000, or the Faculty of 1000, is largely specific to life science, and I believe it is quite well known. This is a forum of experts that recommend papers of interest in their respective fields and score them. I think many people would consider such a recommendation positively. – Bitwise Apr 08 '15 at 01:20
  • @WolfgangBangerth enough to merit mention in a CV? – Abe Apr 08 '15 at 02:33

2 Answers2

9

Conventions may vary somewhat from field to field, but I'll answer with respect to the fields covered by F1000, where people tend to be more interested in citation metrics than in many other areas.

First of all, I wouldn't include F1000 recommendations. I don't think that people take F1000 all that seriously and listing this information smacks of trying too hard. Under most circumstances, I'd suggest that one not include the citation counts either. As discussed in a recent question, the CV is not the place to do a sales job. If your citation metrics are strong, it is indeed good to bring this to the attention of the hiring committee, but you should do so in your cover letter and/or research statement rather than on your CV. Better yet, have one of your letter writers present this information. You could even get them to report the F1000 figures if that is really important to you. Nor would I list an h index on a CV, no matter how good it is. You could mention it in a cover letter, but again it is something that looks much better coming from one of your recommendation letters.

All of that said, if you really have a paper with >10,000 citations as in your example, this is so exceptional that it would merit a note alongside that paper on the CV. Even then, I wouldn't list citation counts for all papers but just for this one. Even a paper >1000 might merit mention on a CV if you are early career, but I wouldn't list anything in the low hundreds on the CV.

I'll conclude by noting that there is a nice economics paper by Harbaugh and To, entitled "False Modesty: When Disclosing Good News Looks Bad", that deals with almost exactly this situation. From their abstract:

Is it always wise to disclose good news? We find that the worst sender with good news has the most incentive to disclose it, so reporting good news can paradoxically make the sender look bad. If the good news is attainable by sufficiently mediocre types, or if the sender is already expected to be of a relatively high type, withholding good news is an equilibrium. Since the sender has a legitimate fear of looking too anxious to reveal good news, having a third party disclose the news, or mandating that the sender disclose the news, can help the sender...

Community
  • 1
Corvus
  • 18,086
  • 6
  • 63
  • 82
  • 3
    +1 For the last paragraph. Recently, I commented on a question http://academia.stackexchange.com/q/42679/546 saying the OP has too much ego by stating he is a student at the most prestigious university in somewhere. That comment got expectedly high up-ticks. Now I know why. – Nobody Apr 03 '15 at 03:40
5

It's quite common and very helpful to provide a link to your author profile in services like Google Scholar, Web of Science, MathSciNet, etc. This makes it possible for someone who wants to look up your publications to find them without confusion with other publications by authors with the same or similar names. They can also look up citation counts and other bibliometric statistics. I've seen these included on many of the CV's that I've reviewed recently.

Citation counts and statistics like the H-index change rapidly, and including them might come across as overly boastful in a CV. I haven't ever seen these on any CV that I've read.

Books and monographs should generally be placed in a separate section of your CV apart from the peer reviewed journal articles. It's also appropriate to have a section for conference proceedings papers and other lesser forms of publication.

Brian Borchers
  • 37,106
  • 4
  • 72
  • 130