November 15, 2015
the Satoshi effect - Bitcoin paper success against the academic review system
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.
November 04, 2015
FC wordcloud
Courtesy of statistical analysis over this site by Uyen Ng.