Someone (can't remember who anymore, even though it was just a couple days ago!) pointed out to me that Google scholar seems to be doing weird things with citations. In particular, it seems to think that the citation relation is symmetric (at least in some cases).
Here's an easy example. Look up Khalid El-Arini's 2009 paper "Turning down the noise in the blogosphere" paper on Google scholar (or just follow that link). Apparently it's been cited by 24 papers. Let's look at who cites them. Apparently in 2003, in addition to inventing LDA, also invented a time machine so that he could cite Khalid's paper!
The weird thing is that this doesn't seem to be a systematic error! It only happens some times.
Oh well, I won't complain -- it just makes my H index look better :)
It seems that Microsoft Academic Search even has citation rate raking... Yours are here: http://academic.research.microsoft.com/Author/3315446/hal-daume-iii
ReplyDeleteCan you be more specific? I see 18 papers in that list, and don't see any from 2003, which one shouldn't be there?
ReplyDeleteThis is weird. Some people see this error, others don't. I wonder if it's a canary. The paper is the LDA paper.
ReplyDeleteHal: I noticed this a couple of weeks ago for some papers. When I spot-checked again today it seems to have disappeared. Perhaps someone at Google noticed your post and fixed whatever bug was causing it. :)
ReplyDeleteI also noticed the error in recent weeks. I thought it was just that: an error. Otherwise, I'm going to start getting angry at those 1996 ACL papers that don't cite my highly relevant work.
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