Fishing citations for your papers. An introduction

Actively seeking your papers to be cited is not well considered in our academic community, it’s compared with snake-oil selling. So, since it’s not a perverse activity in itself but we are forced to do so by the circumstances and the current publishing system, I’m wondering about how to approach it so that it could be accepted better.

What I’ve written so far in this blog, and the limited literature found on the subject, it’s based on a process, where there are activities to be performed before and after the publication of our paper (a kind of workouts), in order to get better citations ratings, with a focus on results.

On the other hand, I’ve found that seeking citations has greater acceptance if presented as an additional writing task to do with your manuscript to improve their search engine rankings (academic SEO) in the future, but it looks like a bit limited and unattractive for a new conceptual model; so I came across with the idea of ​​looking for a sport activity that could have some parallelism with obtaining citations, and I think I’ve found it: citation fishing.

• Fishing is an activity that it’s enjoyed, and benefits are obtained, just with the fact of doing it; it’s rewarding in itself.
• So there is, in theory, no pressure for results, since it depends on many external factors as in the case of fishing it’s the cold waters (field or knowledge), their turbulence (research topic), the time of day (number of authors), the area of the river or the sea (affiliation, experience or academic relevance); which must be known and managed anyway.
• When fishing, we wait patiently for the fish to bite with all the means and planning we have taken for them to do so: knowing the prey (the scientists of my field of knowledge), but patiently let others scientists to come, find our work, and finally bite the hook.

There are many types of fishing, such as trawling, angling, using fishing nets, from a boat, from the shore or into the river itself; but I think that trolling fishing from a boat (web 3.0) is the best suited to our academic type of fish: citations.

• Trolling is a method of fishing where one or more fishing lines (discussions or posts), baited with lures (our papers and background), are drawn through the academic waters (social networks).
• Trolling is used both for recreational and commercial fishing, it’ll depend on your dedication. Multiple lines are often used (academic web sites), and outriggers (the tools: journals platform, academic tools, social networks, etc.) can be used to spread the lines more widely and reduce their chances of tangling. Downriggers (what to do to get to the scientific community: networking, discussions or communications) can also be used to keep the lures or baits trailing at a desired depth.

Would you like to know all the secrets about fishing citations for your papers? I’ll develop further on this type of citation fishing in the future; I hope you’ll enjoy it as much as I do.