Comp Sci Cites

PPS: Feel free to use our "World Wide Web" as well.

@mph - you owe me a new keyboard...

It is a sad state of affairs, to be sure. I always assumed it was a cultural thing, arising out of a fundamental distrust of business competitors (my impression is that most academic computer scientists also have much closer ties to industry than would be the norm in astrophysics). We don't really deal much with patents and intellectual property in astronomy, but certain subsets of biology certainly would. Anyone know if they've experienced a similar problem?

M.

We don't really deal much with patents and intellectual property in astronomy

What do you mean "we", white man?

Unless you work for the Federal Government, you have probably signed a copyright transfer agreement at some point in order to get a paper published. (Maybe some universities have a special division to handle that detail for you, but the places I have worked do not.) That's intellectual property. And for those of us who work on the hardware side of things, patents are a normal byproduct of building a new instrument which does whatever it does better than anything before it.

In addition, some areas of physics, and some departments generally, cultivate close ties with industry (Bell Labs, anyone?). Meanwhile, there is a significant amount of purely theoretical work on things like the P vs. NP problem. The difference in publication habits between physics/astronomy and computer science may well arise from cultural factors, but industrial ties and IP do not by themselves explain the difference.

Dear Physics and Astronomy,

Actually such tools do exist, CiteSeer for example, which was started in 1997: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/ There you go again physicists, jumping into a field without knowing prior art! Please see http://xkcd.com/793/ Just because a bunch of smarty pants at the NRC can't figure this out doesn't mean that they couldn't, you know, ask around and figure this out.

Which reminds me, where is our check for your use Google?

Love Computer Science
p.s. Cue "we invented the web in 3....2....1....". You rode that one all the way to the LHC, do you really think it's going to go much further?

Phbt! arXiv, ADS and SPIRES way predate CiteSeer...

I suspect the NRC has a disconnect because the committee lead presumed such tools were prevalent, and the social science types doing the legwork and working with ISI had never heard of them... $4M over 5 years doesn't buy a lot of people.
This of course is why NRC needed the participating institutions to do most of the hard work of assembling the data.

I think, hm, 15% on http/WWW would be fair - for 17 years?
Including Google of course. We'll give Comp Sci a kickback on the partial contribution to Mosaic development.

Anyway, as you know, I don't give Google checks, Google gives me checks. Well, occasionally, and very very small ones, but still.

xkcd.com/386

All hail google!

@Eric Lund: That's a fair point, thank you.

"the social science types doing the legwork and working with ISI had never heard of them"

Um, there's this new thing out there called Google. You ask it for, say "computer science citation data", and it tells you where to look. You know, like a card catalog, or a librarian.

Or you could, you know, be, like, SOCIAL and ASK.