Many psychological tests have the so-called “lie-scale.” A small but sufficient number of questions that admit only one true answer, such as: “Do you always reply to letters immediately after reading them?” are
inserted among others that are central to the particular test. A wrong reply for such a question adds a point on the lie-scale, and when the lie-score is high, the over-all test results are discarded as unreliable. Perhaps, for a scientist the best candidate for such a lie-scale is the question: “Do you read all of the papers that you cite?”
Comparative studies of the popularity of scientific papers has been a subject of much recent interest [1”“8], but the scope has been limited to citation distribution analysis. We have discovered a method of estimating
what percentage of people who cited the paper had actually read it.
The title of the paper is “Read Before You Cite!” No fair clicking the link until you have guessed, then check out their argument–KSH.
I guessed 20%! Also I noticed a punctuation error on page 270. I read all of this article, except I didn’t really read the equations in the sense of understanding them. I wonder if a variable they didn’t consider is the citation software that many people use today. Two people citing the same article and using the same software might have the same error even if they read the article.
I guessed 25% – so I wasn’t too far off, since 5% constitutes 25% of 25%, approximately.