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I am applying for a faculty position and want to highlight the quality of my publications.

Are any of the following appropriate in an academic CV:

  • citation rate (citations/year)
  • F1000 Recommendations
  • separating a 'monograph' from other 'articles'?

If so, how should I do it?

For example, should I just put the information parenthetically at the end of the reference, like:

Author (Year) Title, journal, vol, (> 10000 citations; 2 F1000 recommendations)


note: this question Should I put my h-index on my CV? is similar, and some of the ideas from that question apply here. However, it is not a strict duplicate because the h-index addressed there is a single metric for evaluating a candidate; my question relates to publication-level metrics, and which are useful to provide within the reference list of a CV.

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    I've never heard of F1000. If I haven't heard of it, others may not either, so they will find it odd if you cite it. Commented Apr 3, 2015 at 1:15
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    Closely related: academia.stackexchange.com/q/17990/19607
    – Kimball
    Commented Apr 3, 2015 at 4:49
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    @CameronWilliams: I would hope no-one takes the citation number indicated by Google Scholar overly seriously, given that it is highly distorted - it includes "citations" found in bachelor theses and the like, if the university's digital library catalogue happens to be indexed. Commented Apr 3, 2015 at 9:40
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    it includes "citations" found in bachelor theses and the like — So what?
    – JeffE
    Commented Apr 3, 2015 at 14:40
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    @O.R.Mapper: I actually find such citations just as useful as ones in journals. I shows real impact. Commented Apr 3, 2015 at 14:42

2 Answers 2

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Conventions may vary somewhat from field to field, but I'll answer with respect to the fields covered by F1000, where people tend to be more interested in citation metrics than in many other areas.

First of all, I wouldn't include F1000 recommendations. I don't think that people take F1000 all that seriously and listing this information smacks of trying too hard. Under most circumstances, I'd suggest that one not include the citation counts either. As discussed in a recent question, the CV is not the place to do a sales job. If your citation metrics are strong, it is indeed good to bring this to the attention of the hiring committee, but you should do so in your cover letter and/or research statement rather than on your CV. Better yet, have one of your letter writers present this information. You could even get them to report the F1000 figures if that is really important to you. Nor would I list an h index on a CV, no matter how good it is. You could mention it in a cover letter, but again it is something that looks much better coming from one of your recommendation letters.

All of that said, if you really have a paper with >10,000 citations as in your example, this is so exceptional that it would merit a note alongside that paper on the CV. Even then, I wouldn't list citation counts for all papers but just for this one. Even a paper >1000 might merit mention on a CV if you are early career, but I wouldn't list anything in the low hundreds on the CV.

I'll conclude by noting that there is a nice economics paper by Harbaugh and To, entitled "False Modesty: When Disclosing Good News Looks Bad", that deals with almost exactly this situation. From their abstract:

Is it always wise to disclose good news? We find that the worst sender with good news has the most incentive to disclose it, so reporting good news can paradoxically make the sender look bad. If the good news is attainable by sufficiently mediocre types, or if the sender is already expected to be of a relatively high type, withholding good news is an equilibrium. Since the sender has a legitimate fear of looking too anxious to reveal good news, having a third party disclose the news, or mandating that the sender disclose the news, can help the sender...

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    +1 For the last paragraph. Recently, I commented on a question academia.stackexchange.com/q/42679/546 saying the OP has too much ego by stating he is a student at the most prestigious university in somewhere. That comment got expectedly high up-ticks. Now I know why.
    – Nobody
    Commented Apr 3, 2015 at 3:40
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It's quite common and very helpful to provide a link to your author profile in services like Google Scholar, Web of Science, MathSciNet, etc. This makes it possible for someone who wants to look up your publications to find them without confusion with other publications by authors with the same or similar names. They can also look up citation counts and other bibliometric statistics. I've seen these included on many of the CV's that I've reviewed recently.

Citation counts and statistics like the H-index change rapidly, and including them might come across as overly boastful in a CV. I haven't ever seen these on any CV that I've read.

Books and monographs should generally be placed in a separate section of your CV apart from the peer reviewed journal articles. It's also appropriate to have a section for conference proceedings papers and other lesser forms of publication.

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