Before the Blog had a short break, I had planned a post to celebrate my success at getting one of my papers into EER's top ten downloads chart. The journal keeps track of those of its papers that are most downloaded, and also most often cited, and I found myself with one in the top ten, and another in the top twenty. I was over the moon, so to speak, at having such success thrust upon me. The editor did his best to inject reality into my nascent celebrations, noting that "download" does not imply "read", and that, even if read, this does not imply "impact". No matter, I thought, the top ten is the Top Ten.
Imagine my chagrin, therefore, to discover that the mere passage of a week or so had resulted in my slipping out of the top ten as the recent downloads show. Indeed, I am almost slipping out of the top twenty with the papers in question at 17 and 18.
Success is so ephemeral, I mused to myself. Hardly worth blogging about ... . Except that I note that of those in the top twenty, one of my papers [ Environmental education research: 30 years on from Tbilisi – 15(2) 2009 ] is in the top five (well, fifth) of those cited by others in those 20. A straw, then, definitely to clutch at.
Mind you, reading on, it seems I now also have two jointly-authored papers in EER's top ten papers cited by others, which I'm sure were not there last week. I'm feeling better already ...
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