Do you look at publications which cite yours?

[MorganSeventh]

I'm an ECR and only have six publications. If I receive a Google Scholar alert I will aways check to see what the citing works says about mine. However, I'm not sure if that's the 'done thing.' More senior colleagues seem to think it is rather unsophisticated to do so (or, at least, think that admitting to it is rather unsophisticated...) So I was curious, is it one of those things that everyone does and no one admits to, or do you simply stop caring past a certain point?

I used to "curate" my citations, just to make sure they really did cite me. Also because I sit at intersection of fields and at the time no single location would have as high numbers as if I did the curation combing them; now google gets most of them (with some small inflation of mistakes, but that balances out the few they still miss). And, yes, I would check and see what they said. :)

I found it reasonably useful as a way to keep connected to literature - many things were in locations I wouldn't have read otherwise, and then I ended up citing them as I found some of them useful.

But when you have 100s of citations it just gets a bit overwhelming. I do follow up now if a rarely-cited paper gets a notification (like "how did they find that? nobody ever does....") but mostly don't pay attention to my more popular papers now. Unless I need a quick-and-dirty literature search of my field, when I'll just hit my citations in google scholar.

I totally don't see anything 'unsophisticated' about it - perhaps suggests you have some time to kill :) but reading the literature is always a good use of time (I don't have nearly the time to devote to reading as I wish I did), and surely it is relevant to your work if they cite you! So a good way to get relevant info.

I think it's also a good way to find people with similar interests. If you're cited, then presumably you had something of interest to say to them?

Of course! How would I know who to have a beef with otherwise?

I'm not an academic, but work for the research councils (joined from a totally different area of the public sector not that long ago) - I'm astonished at the amount of snobbery and judgement you often see among senior academics. There is still a lot of backward and old school thinking in lots of areas of academia. Ignore them! It makes total sense that you would check out your citations!

I'm not in academia; I work in industry but still have my papers cited. Of course I check! Not sure why it would be unsophisticated.

Religiously!

No I don't. But maybe I should!

I check mine. Good to know how, why and where they are referenced.

Wasn't easy to find them when I was an ECR. No time nowadays to do this routinely. Sometimes I have a glance since G-Scholar makes it so easy. No harm in it...

One article we did has been unexpectedly popular to cite, so interesting to see who found it useful. It's about an idea that was buzzword fashionable but my research showed there was no way (yet) to prove it was a good idea.

Absolutely I do. I actually subscribe to Google Scholar alerts for papers that cite my work and like pp, this helps keep track of authors and journals that intersect with my interests. In most cases the abstract is enough to work out if it's just a citation of my method, or if they've engaged with my research more substantively.

(And just the once I found a paper in an obscure journal that had on the one hand cited me, and on the other lifted entire sections of my work without quotation, or attribution. The paper was retracted by the editors within a day of my alerting them, to my relief).

Gosh impostor that's a cautionary tale!