The First Citation.

It was lazy Saturday morning and I woke up pretty late, yet all I had in my mind was to blog again this week. Sluggishly I opened my Gmail to see an email with the subject ‘New citations to my articles.’ I frowned, being sure that it was spam as I believed that it was highly unlikely that I would get a citation. But some innate tantalizing desire surfaced me and before deleting that email, I opened up my Google Scholar profile. And voila! I got my first citation. It took some time for me to accept that people actually recognized my work and have given me credit. Out of excitement, I immediately shared it with parents and my best friends. But then something hit me.

Back in 2017 when I worked on that project, I was very disinterested in the field I was working on and comforted myself by stating every possible positive point of the field repeatedly. That time I realized that people often lie to themselves to comfort them instead of confronting myself. And this blunder has costed me to take a harder path to get to the present. Had I said no to myself and moved on to another field, I might have already known the basics of my current field of interest and saved a lot of time.

But when I came to know that my work was cited, I completely forgot about the travesty and was suddenly feeling good. NO MATTER WHAT YOUR WORK IS, HAPPINESS THE FIRST CITATION BRINGS IS IMMESTIMABLE! Although it was a very novel and quality work, published in a reputed journal with a high impact factor, I never appreciated it due to my dissimilar interest from it. But when someone from a different country has credited my work, I appreciated the flexibility in the disseminating nature of science and recanted my past ideology. A better way to parry these thoughts would be when we actually start doing what we want to rather than being gloomy.

The next interesting thing happened when a friend asked me how many citations I would be getting. Since the main purpose of the website is to market myself and keep the blog active, I realized that this was my topic for this week. But beware, this might be too harsh. :p

Coming back to when my friend asked me about the citations my first publication would be getting, I replied that it might be getting very few citations, as the work is done only at limited places, despite its quality. I then realized that it is not just the quality of the work, but also the demand and the huge scientific community that determines the number of cites. When a person is in a small cohort doing outdated research, he cannot truly expect to get more citations no matter how good the quality is and this is a bitter truth that I want to be open about. Charles Darwin aptly stated – ‘Survival of the Fittest’ which can be postulated to this topic as well. In an evolving cyber world, we need to accept a few things and move forward by integrating what the world likes with what we want to do. The best example I found recently is a paper with more than 10 authors, which got over 500 citations with a few days after it got published. Reason – it was on COVID-19 modeling. I am not saying that the researchers are lucky or they are clever to utilize this an opportunity to boost their h-indices. I am just trying to say that- it is how things work in real life. So, the correct reply to his question should have been – ‘It doesn’t matter!’