The science publishing and peer-review process gets a lot of grief, often for good reason. Many fruitful areas of paradigm changing research languish outside the major journals and never pass from the gatekeepers to the printing press.
But thankfully the YDIH, despite the controversy and “robust” debate, appears regularly in the world’s top earth science publications. This is a credit to the excellent data and the quality of the lead author’s writing, not to mention the many reviewers and editors staying open minded despite the profound consequences of the hypothesis.
But is anyone reading? Clearly they are. The statistics below confirm the Comet Research Group’s YDIH papers are some of the very most popular reads in science literature. And crucially, the statistics reveal the readership and curiosity is of scientists themselves, since presumably the public isn’t digging through the dense primary materials.
So what does it mean? It means the system is working! Despite the painful intellectual turmoil well documented on the Tusk and elsewhere, these statistics demonstrate that a subject that needs attention, is getting attention (even if they are reading furtively, and watching for the dean or lab director).
The Stats:
–Firestone et al. has been cited more than 480 times, and among all the papers scored by Altmetrics, that paper ranks in the top 5% of the tens of millions of research papers ever ranked. The paper also has the highest possible Attention Score (99th percentile) compared to >250,000 papers of the same age both in all journals and for PNAS, according to Altmetrics data at PNAS.org.
https://pnas.altmetric.com/details/116572
–Bunch et al. (2012) ranks in the top 5% of many millions research papers ever scored by Altmetric. It also has a High Attention Score (99th percentile) compared to papers of the same age in all of the world’s journals, as well as ranking in the 99th percentile of papers of the same age in PNAS.
https://pnas.altmetric.com/details/797760
–According to Nature.com, another recent paper by Moore et al. (2017) also ranks in the 99th percentile of the 252,880 tracked articles of a similar age in all journals and ranks 1st among all tracked articles of a similar age in Scientific Reports.
https://www.nature.com/articles/srep44031/metrics
–Similarly, Pino et al. (2019) in the 99th percentile (ranked 654th) of the 262,042 tracked articles of a similar age in all journals and ranks 1st among all tracked articles of a similar age in Scientific Reports.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-018-38089-y/metrics
–Moore et al. (2019) is in the 99th percentile (ranked 826th) of the 270,322 tracked articles of a similar age in all journals and in the 99th percentile (ranked 67th) of the 12,091 tracked articles of a similar age in Scientific Reports.