Recommended Publications

November 15, 2012

The citation count of a scientific publication is considered to be an indicator for its impact. Google Scholar includes citation counts for publications and uses this as an important metric for ranking search results. Thus, a paper with many citations is more likely to show up in search results. That makes it more likely that it will be read and cited, resulting in even more citations. This makes literature search with Scholar quite effective. But one effect is that new papers (no citations initially) in an existing field may not be noticed, even if they have relevant results. Papers with many citations hide (shadow) papers with few citations. This mechanism may even be at work in the publications of a single author.

When I examined my Google Scholar author profile before, it was mostly to examine my h-index and top cited publications. And I was happy enough to see that a good number of my publications are being cited well (today my h-index is 35). However, there are more publications with fewer citations. That is to be expected. Not all publications are equally good or important. What I noticed however, is that some papers that I consider to be among the best work of me and my students, are poorly cited. Therefore, I decided to compose a list of recommended publications for the front page of my web site, instead of the usual suspects from the hit list. If you like those other papers, you may like these as well (or even better):

Recommendations

Syntax definition and parsing

Language composition

Transformation and analysis

Integrated development environments

Abstractions for web programming

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