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The science that’s never been cited

Nature investigates how many papers really end up without a single citation.
  1. Richard Van Noorden
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The geneticist and Nobel prizewinner Oliver Smithies, who died in January aged 91, was a modest, self-effacing inventor. It was typical of him to trot out the tale of one of his greatest flops: a paper1 about measuring osmotic pressure published in 1953, which, as he put it, had “the dubious distinction of never being cited”.

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Nature 552, 162-164 (2017)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-017-08404-0

Updates & Corrections

  • Correction 02 February 2018: This article originally included a link to data behind the charts. Nature has subsequently been told that the data are not available to make public.

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