Tuesday, March 16, 2010

Is being recognized always good?

Yesterday I received an email from a former research colleague that exclaimed that a paper that I co-wrote with him in the past has surpassed 100 citations. The paper, Problems with fitting to the power-law distribution was quite an interesting paper to write. The idea to write it was from the aforementioned colleague, but most of the experiments and statistical background was given by me (that's why I was given the first author position on the paper).

I'm proud of having written it, but every time I read about it I remember one sad thing: this wasn't what my research was about. None of the papers I wrote for my research received any recognition. It's quite an interesting conflict that probably I'll have to live with for the rest of my life. Unless I decide to get back to research and continue my work on feature extraction on graph-structured databases until I find ways to draw better parallels to other people's research results and people can use my proposed ideas.

Anyway, I should be happy for the achievement. 100 citations in 5.5 years is something that very few can claim. Actually Google Scholar claims that the paper has something between 174 and 175 citations. I don't trust the results of Google Scholar, but I have to live with it, as it's the only "free" system that provides some sort of comprehensive view of articles and citations.

Sometimes people need to be careful with statements

The written language is a powerful thing, but is also a dangerous weapon that can backfire if you don't know your audience very well and don't measure your words correctly. Here is a statement that I received from somebody through email:

"[...] the development is either algorithmic or done in C# [...]"

In other words, this person claimed that no algorithms can be done in C#? Quite a strong statement!