One issue in faculty reviews is trying to determine the effect the research of a faculty member is having. For that, we do things like get outside letters, read papers, and so on. In the past, we also checked things like the Science Citation Index for counts on how often a paper is referenced. Recently, Google Scholar has taken on that role, for better or worse. It is better than SCI in the sense it lists very recent references that may not be in the published literature yet. It also is very wide ranging, catching things SCI doesn’t catch. Of course, it may also catch garbage, but that is the tradeoff. It also undercounts older papers that don’t have as strong an online presence.
One surrogate for “effect” is number of references in Google Scholar. I thought it would be interesting to see the OR work with the most references. Here are a few I found:
- Dantzig (Linear Programming and Extensions): 1384
- Garey and Johnson (Computers and Intractibility): 12334 plus other editions
- Nemhauser and Wolsey (Integer Programming): 2199
- Rockafellar (Convex Analysis): 4470
- Schrijver (Theory of Integer and Linear Programming): 1866
- Papadimitriou and Steiglitz (Combinatorial Optimization): 2364
- Ahuja, Magnanti, and Orlin (Network Flows): 2037
- Karmarkar (16th ACM Polynomial Time Linear Programming): 1329
- Trick (hah!, Cliques, Coloring and Satisfiability): 126
So I have Papadimitriou and Steiglitz (deciding Rockafellar and Garey and Johnson are not “really” OR) as the most referenced book and Karmarkar as the most referenced paper. Anybody beat that?
Scheduling Algorithms for Multiprogramming in a Hard-Real-Time Environment CL Liu, JW Layland – Journal of the ACM (JACM), 1973
Cited by 3478
This exercise notes how hard it is to draw lines around “Operations Research”: a lot depends on what is considered “Computer Science” versus “OR”. I would classify the above as CS, but Karkarkar as OR, but would be hard pressed to explain why!
I agree with you. In fact I just try my favourite keyword “scheduling” in google scholar and I discovered it was the most cited paper (even more cited than classical textbooks). But I understand it is not a “typical OR” scheduling paper (in fact I did not know it before)
David G Luenberger
Linear and Nonlinear Programming 2371
Optimization by Vector Space Methods 1571