Why publish a research paper when a blog post or a lecture slide can have more citation count than a journal paper?

Question

I am quite surprised to find that a lecture slide for a course has 133 citations from highly reputable researchers across the world. The main contribution of the lecture slides (which seems to be the reason for the citations) appears in 1 line on 1 page of the slide out of 30 slides. (Citation count according to Google Scholar)

• Another set of random course notes from lecture 12 of a course just happens to have over 100 citations, Reinforcement Learning and Control - CS229

• This 8 page course note has 200 citations, which is more than many of actual research papers

• Also, another summary of a blog post (less than 14 pages) has over 700 citations (From the paper: This paper originally appeared as a blog post on 19 January 2016.)

  Citation count from Google Scholar. This paper isn't even published anywhere aside from Arxiv.

What is the point of even publishing a paper and going through the painstaking process of peer review and editing if you can just write some blog post or a lecture slide on some hot topic and accumulate citation counts (which is crucial for securing funding, etc.)?

Answer 1

It's not fair to only look at the peak of the distribution. For an apples-to-apples comparison, you need to compare peaks to peaks and averages to averages.

The two sources you mention are both in the field of machine learning. If we assume that they correspond to the blog/lecture notes sources with the most number of citations (i.e. the peaks), then we can conclude that these venues can generate at most ~700 citations. If you compare to the most cited machine learning papers, these 700 citations are minute. For example putting "machine learning" into Google Scholar yields:

Scikit-learn: Machine learning in Python (journal article) -- 14919 citations

Data Mining: Practical machine learning tools and techniques (book) -- 34724 citations

What about averages? I don't know what the average number of citations a blog post or lecture slide gets, but I'd guess less than one, since many blog posts don't attract comments. The average number of citations for a journal article however is easy to find - just look at the impact factor. Putting in "machine learning journal" into Bing, I get journals such as Machine Learning (IF = 1.855 as of time of writing) and International Journal of Neural Systems (IF = 4.58). Clearly the average journal article gets a lot more citations than the average blog post or lecture slide.

tl; dr: What's the point of studying machine learning instead of playing soccer and earning hundreds of thousands of dollars a week? The answer to that question is similar to the answer to this one.

Answer 2

1. The instances you mention don't show that statistically blogs or slides get cited well. Just that you find some instances in the universe of events.

2. Papers tend to be abstracted (chemistry does this quite well). Blogs and slides not.

3. Science citation searches don't generally index blogs and slides (especially uncited ones). Thus they can be difficult to find during a lit search.

4. Journals exercise a function of review and editing that drives a superior work product in formatting. Blogs and slides are generally a mess in their referencing fro instance, compared to papers. It's not just that editors and reviewers drive this but that authors tend to "up their game" when sending work product for review.

5. There is some benefit in review scientifically (more so for weaker papers, but still).

6. Papers help your career.

7. Nothing prevents publicizing a paper by blogging or presenting it in addition. And usually the blogging or presenting will be superior because solid work has already been done previously.*

8. Narrative technical reports ("Word documents" or the sort) are generally superior to slideware in information density and quality. [Read the Tufte contributions to the Space Shuttle disaster inquiry for some of this...Feynman had same issue with the previous disaster and the problems with slides versus sentence and paragraph reports.

*Small aenecdote to explain. I took a course once where we had a true seminar (oval table discussion with small group) on foreign policy controversies. Every Tuesday, we handed in a 2 page written paper before the discussion (on a set of readings). Every Thursday, we just had discussion, on a new set of reading, but no paper was required. The Tuesday discussions were stunningly better than the Thursday discussions. Doesn't this make sense when you think how much better you understand something after writing it up properly? The same applies for doing a presentation or a blog on a piece of science (after writing it up formally).

Answer 3

Slides and blog posts do not get more citations than journal papers.

You've given non-representative or invalid examples:

1. For the paper following a blog post: It's the ArXiv paper that has the citations, not the blog post.
2. For Andrew Ng's course notes: Sometimes, professors arrange for a course-note-taking semesterial project which is intended to eventually produce a textbook. When this happens, notes are taken much more seriously, beefed up a lot of after class, go through round(s) of review by the professor or peer students, follow strict formatting guidelines etc. This is nothing like lecture slides. Also, textbooks != papers.
3. The "Notes on Convolutional Neural Networks" document is not a deck of lecture slides nor a blog post. The fact that it has "notes" in the title does not mean it is just some scribbles jotted down - it looks serious.

... so your premise is unsubstantiated. Actually, it's incorrect as far as a I know.

Answer 4

Apart from the overgeneralization in your premise, which was pointed out in other answers:

Blog posts and lecture slides don't carry the scientific authority of peer-reviewed and professionally edited publications like journals. Peer-review and the services of scientific editors serve as a vetting process to filter out publications that don't hold up to scientific scrutiny. The vetting is performed by (usually two or three) qualified researchers on behalf of the scientific community. By contrast, the credibility of a blog post or lecture slide depends entirely on the reputation and trustworthiness of its author. Not only is this a less stringent criterion, it is also hard to assess for outsiders.

Answer 5

The principal contemporary reason for formally publishing articles is that governments and institutional administrators demand of researchers proof of their productivity. Being unable to assess such productivity according to their own criteria (in general because they have none) they attach simple metrics to research activity which they use to rank researchers. The principal metrics are money secured in competitive grant programs and counts of papers indexed by some supposed authority. In the current moment, publishing in journals serves mainly to achieve the second goal.

Formal journal publishing generally adds little value from an intellectual point of view and generates obstacles (paywalls) to dissemination of ideas. Something like the ArXiv achieves wide, free, dissemination of knowledge in a rapid and easy way. The author can write an article according to the author's criteria and distribute it as the author sees fit. Sometimes the refereeing process adds value, when the referees and editors behave in a serious fashion, but more often they do not or the process simply delays dissemination.

Answer 6

The "citation count" from Google Scholar is not a real citation count. It is automatically compiled, includes lots of false positives, duplicates, etc.

Also it counts citations from things like other lecture slides, blogs, etc. None of these will count for anything when you are applying for funding. Any sort of funding/hiring/promotion that wants to look at your citation count is only going to count:

1. Citations of your peer reviewed publications
2. from publications which are themselves peer reviewed.

Answer 7

Journal publishing is about branding. There are three ways to create a successful mousetrap:

(a) Design the best mousetrap in the world and hope that the news spreads by word of mouth. If it's really outstanding, then you might succeed.

(b) Establish a reputation as the best designer of household gadgets in the world, so that people are actively looking out for your next idea.

(c) Advertise your mousetrap in a catalog produced by a well-known retailer, so that a proportion of people will buy it even it it's nothing special.

Exactly the same is true if you're a researcher peddling intellectual ideas. A very small number of people are capable of succeeding using approach (a) or (b). For the rest, the only way to get anywhere is approach (c) - where the retailer/brand in this case is the journal that you publish in.

Answer 8

Is your primary goal really citations? Or is your primary goal to contribute in a substantive way to the research in your field?

In my fields (Physics & Engineering) journals articles are where the details of new research can be found, and are accessible for decades or centuries. It is not a rare to find important information in older published works. This is how the knowledge of human kind has been growing for centuries, and as a method of structuring academic information sharing, it works.

Even more, if you want to contribute something to this world, journal articles and the peer review structure have the permanence to allow your ideas and contribution to connect with others. It is true that newer media methods also can do this, but journal articles are a very concrete way to contribute for the long term.

However, if you do not want to contribute to the grand project of increasing human knowledge, and are instead interested only in increasing your citation count, why bother with peer review?