Anyone that maintains a website is happy that people out there are interested enough to visit. Web traffic is one thing, but I take greatest pleasure in seeing quantixed posts being cited in academic papers.
I love the fact that some posts on here have been cited in the literature more than some of my actual papers.
It’s difficult to track citations to web resources. This is partly my fault, I think it is possible to register posts so that they have a DOI, but I have not done this and so tracking is a difficult task. Websites are part of what is known as the grey literature: items that are not part of traditional academic publishing.
The most common route for me to discover that a post has been cited is when I actually read the paper. There are four examples that spring to mind: here, here, here and here. With these papers, I read the paper and was surprised to find quantixed cited in the bibliography.
Vanity and curiosity made me wonder if there were other citations I didn’t know about. A cited reference search in Web of Science pulled up two more: here and here.
A bit of Googling revealed yet more citations, e.g. two quantixed posts are cited in this book. And another citation here.
OK so quantixed is not going to win any “highly cited” prizes or develop a huge H-index (if something like that existed for websites). But I’m pleased that 1) there are this many citations given that there’s a bias against citing web resources, and 2) the content here has been useful to others, particularly for academic work.
All of these citations are to posts looking at impact factors, metrics and publication lag times. In terms of readership, these posts get sustained traffic, but currently the most popular posts on quantixed are the “how to” guides, LaTeX to Word and Back seeing the most traffic. Somewhere in between citation and web traffic are cases when quantixed posts get written about elsewhere, e.g. in a feature in Nature by Kendall Powell.
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The post title comes from “Five Get Over Excited” by The Housemartins. A band with a great eye for song titles, it can be found on the album “The People Who Grinned Themselves to Death”.