One of the things that has clearly outlined the dilemma for the academic community is that papers that are self-published or "informally published" to borrow a slur from the inclusion market are making some headway, at least if the Bitcoin paper is a guide to go by.
Here's a quick straw poll checking a year's worth of papers. In the narrow field of financial cryptography, I trawled through FC conference proceedings in 2009, WEIS 2009. For Cryptology in general I added Crypto 2009. I used google scholar to report direct citations, and checked what I'd found against Citeseer (I also added the number of citations for the top citer in rightmost column, as an additional check. You can mostly ignore that number.) I came across Wang et al's paper from 2005 on SHA1, and a few others from the early 2000s and added them for comparison - I'm unsure what other crypto papers are as big in the 2000s.
| Conf | paper | Google Scholar | Citeseer | top derivative citations |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| jMLR 2003 | Latent dirichlet allocation | 12788 | 2634 | 26202 |
| NIPS 2004 | MapReduce: simplified data processing on large clusters | 15444 | 2023 | 14179 |
| CACM 1981 | Untraceable electronic mail, return addresses, and digital pseudonyms | 4521 | 1397 | 3734 |
| self | Security without identification: transaction systems to make Big Brother obsolete | 1780 | 470 | 2217 |
| Crypto 2005 | Finding collisions in the full SHA-1 | 1504 | 196 | 886 |
| SIGKDD 2009 | The WEKA data mining software: an update | 9726 | 704 | 3099 |
| STOC 2009 | Fully homomorphic encryption using ideal lattices | 1923 | 324 | 770 |
| self | Bitcoin: A peer-to-peer electronic cash system | 804 | 57 | 202 |
| Crypto09 | Dual System Encryption: Realizing Fully Secure IBE and HIBE under Simple Assumptions | 445 | 59 | 549 |
| Crypto09 | Fast Cryptographic Primitives and Circular-Secure Encryption Based on Hard Learning Problems | 223 | 42 | 485 |
| Crypto09 | Distinguisher and Related-Key Attack on the Full AES-256 | 232 | 29 | 278 |
| FC09 | Secure multiparty computation goes live | 191 | 25 | 172 |
| WEIS 2009 | The privacy jungle: On the market for data protection in social networks | 186 | 18 | 221 |
| FC09 | Private intersection of certified sets | 84 | 24 | 180 |
| FC09 | Passwords: If We’re So Smart, Why Are We Still Using Them? | 89 | 16 | 322 |
| WEIS 2009 | Nobody Sells Gold for the Price of Silver: Dishonesty, Uncertainty and the Underground Economy | 82 | 24 | 275 |
| FC09 | Optimised to Fail: Card Readers for Online Banking | 80 | 24 | 226 |
What can we conclude? Within the general infosec/security/crypto field in 2009, the Bitcoin paper is the second paper after Fully homomorphic encryption (which is probably not even in use?). If one includes all CS papers in 2009, then it's likely pushed down a 100 or so slots according to citeseer although I didn't run that test.
If we go back in time there are many more influential papers by citations, but there's a clear need for time. There may well be others I've missed, but so far we're looking at one of a very small handful of very significant papers at least in the cryptocurrency world.
It would be curious if we could measure the impact of self-publication on citations - but I don't see a way to do that as yet.
Posted by iang at November 15, 2015 11:34 AMlists lots of papers winning awards in CS.
Posted by: Best papers awards at November 26, 2015 04:40 PMPeer-to-Peer Review: The State of Academic Bitcoin Research 2015
PEER-REVIEW
I've updated my epic BITCOIN ACADEMIC PAPER DATABASE by adding over 280 new papers that were published in 2015. You can download it, and I've also included a link to a separate Google doc where you can make suggestions for papers that might have been missed.
If you'd like to read about how I've built the database and the sources I've used, check out my piece about it from last year. Don't expect it to be perfect - there are omissions and the citations are not always error-free - but it's a pretty comprehensive start for anyone looking to embark on furthering the state of knowledge on Bitcoin, cryptocurrency and blockchain more generally.
The quality of papers is... um... variable and obviously I haven't had a chance to actually read most of them (as there are now over 550 in total), so don't be surprised if some are not as 'academic' or robust as you might like. That said, the quality of papers has - in general - improved over the last year. For the record, the basic definition of 'academic' in this context is: showing signs of a systematic research and analysis process that extends beyond just ranting, idle speculation or marketing. Note, though, that this does not narrow it to bland positivist (social) science. High quality and high effort philosophical, 'non-scientific' and even partisan political explorations are considered valid.
...
Bitcoin academic papers published in:
2008: Bitcoin Whitepaper
2010: 1
2011: 8
2012: 21
2013: 64
2014: 217
2015: 288
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1VaWhbAj7hWNdiE73P-W-wrl5a0WNgzjofmZXe0Rh5sg/edit#gid=0
Posted by: Bitcoin papers published by year at January 13, 2016 06:38 PMThis whole Bitcoin thing is a giant conspiracy to me.
SOMEONE wants to know if the particular hash algorithm on which it is based is crackable, and SOMEONE will not believe the answer unless a lot of (other people's) money is put at stake on the answer.
SHA256 hash iterated for a second time in such a strange manner as almost to weaken it. Very strange. There is something else that SOMEONE wants to crack.
Posted by: Honey Bee XCIX at January 27, 2017 11:58 PM