"This article examines the relationship between acquaintanceship and coauthorship patterns in a multi-disciplinary, multi-institutional, geographically distributed research center. Two social networks are constructed and compared: a network of coauthorship, representing how researchers write articles with one another, and a network of acquaintanceship, representing how those researchers know each other on a personal level, based on their responses to an online survey. Statistical analyses of the topology and community structure of these networks point to the importance of small-scale, local, personal networks predicated upon acquaintanceship for accomplishing collaborative work in scientific communities."

"…We tested our algorithm on a small benchmark graph and on a network of about 500 papers in information science (weighted with the Salton index of bibliographic coupling). In our tests, this approach results in characteristic ranges of resolution where a large resolution change does not lead to a growth of the natural community. Such stable modules were also obtained by applying the LFK algorithm but since we determine communities for all resolution values in one run, our approach is faster than the LFK reference. And our algorithm reveals the hierarchical structure of the graph more easily."

"Algorithmic historiography was proposed by Eugene Garfield in collaboration with Irving Sher in the 1960s, but further developed only recently into HistCite^{TM} with Alexander Pudovkin. As in history writing, HistCite^{TM} reconstructs by drawing intellectual lineages. In addition to cited references, however, documents can be attributed a multitude of other variables such as title words, keywords, journal names, author names, and even full texts. New developments in multidimensional scaling (MDS) enable us not only to visualize these patterns at each moment of time, but also to animate them over time. Using title words, co-authors, and journal names in Garfield's oeuvre, the method is demonstrated and further developed in this paper (and in the animation at this http URL). The variety and substantive content of the animation enables us to write, visualize, and animate the author's intellectual history."

"So what is the point of publication? Certainly you want your paper easily read and cited. But also you want a careful peer review leading to a polished version that has the stamp of approval by appearing in some respectable conference or journal. Publishing also acts as a filter, allowing the reader to get some idea of the level of quality of the paper before reading it. Almost any paper can appear on an archive site but it takes more to be published."

"This mystical belief in the magic of citation statis- tics can be found throughout the documentation for research assessment exercises, both national and in- stitutional. It can also be found in the work of those promoting the h-index and its variants."

"Can a combination of a wiki, karma, and a voting method like reddit or digg substitute the current system of academic publication?"

[A: yes]

"Can we learn anything from all this? Going back to the triumph-of-evil quote, we may ask, how can we defend ourselves from the bogus quote? It is clearly unreasonable for anyone to have to prove a quote bogus...."

"When citing Magic 8-Balls:..."

"in the world of science, being first means a great deal and can be the determining factor in whether a study gets published. The truth is, although the efforts were independent, ours was published first — and Clinical Infectious Diseases scooped Nature — a decent consolation prize amid the go-google din."

Matthew Berryman is citing some of what we should see.

This may or may not be true each discipline; depends on their folkways.

"[A] lot of scholarly writing in the humanities and some social sciences uses citation as a marker of institutional sociology, as a performance of intellectual identity, as an affect of authority rather than the substance of it."

"...the most prominent (and thus most citable) authors are more likely to make their articles available in an OA model, and that they are more likely to do so with their most important (and thus most citable) articles."

Somehow more professionally satisfying than just Googling yourself: Amazon yourself!