00:00:00.000Hi everybody, this is Gad Saad. Earlier today on my social media, I posted a
00:00:06.600screenshot of a paper from 2019, an academic paper in the journal
00:00:12.960Scientometrics. Basically, Scientometrics is a way by which you can quantify
00:00:20.600metrics related to science. You know, who cites whom, which journals
00:00:26.520cite which other journals how many citations does the average nobel laureate get and so on so there
00:00:33.880are ways by which you can scientifically study the manner by which science is diffused it's called
00:00:42.360scientometrics i have myself published two papers in that wonderful journal and so today what i did
00:00:50.760it is I looked for, you know, I've previously cited the fact that the modal number of citations
00:00:59.260for academic papers is zero. I mean, really, you have to think about what that means.
00:01:06.300Much of the work that is published goes unsighted. And here, when we are talking about citations,
00:01:12.580we're not referring to, let's say you're cited by the New York Times, which might be a wonderful
00:01:19.440thing, but we're talking about citations within academic databases. So if my paper has been cited
00:01:27.40050 times, that means there are 50 other academic sources that have cited my work.
00:01:37.680And so to give you a sense, if a paper is cited a hundred times, that's considered a home run,
00:01:45.500Meaning, you know, irrespective of the amount of time it took for this to happen, you know, within 5-10 years paper, a paper that's cited 100 times would be considered, you know, a paper that was at least academically very successful.
00:01:58.400And so I pulled out from this 2019 paper in Scientometrics, this is volume 119, pages 1227 to 1254, I could put a link to the actual paper.
00:02:20.840And what they've done here is they've looked at the publication period from 1996 to 2015, so nearly a 30-year period, meaning to give enough time for papers to amass citations.
00:02:38.840And then they broke them up into arts and humanities, computer science, engineering, mathematics, medicine, physics and astronomy, and social sciences.
00:02:52.640And then they looked at how many papers have zero citations within that search.
00:03:02.740And so to give you a sense, you're talking about millions and millions of
00:03:06.300papers in each of these categories. So I'm rounding off here, 1.3 million papers, 3.2
00:03:13.940million papers, 6.2 million papers, 1.9 million papers, 9.6 million papers, 4.2 million papers,
00:03:21.060and 2.7 million papers. So those are the total number of papers published within this time period
00:03:27.340in each of those categories, and then they calculate the number of papers that have zero
00:03:34.780citations. So, for example, for Arts and Humanities, the unsighted ratio is 0.38, meaning 38% of papers
00:03:44.340published in the past 30 years in Arts and Humanities have received zero citations. So,
00:03:51.980let me just go through the unsighted ratio. Arts and humanities, 38%. Computer science, 27%.
00:04:00.460Engineering, 30%. Mathematics, 22%. Medicine, 23%. Physics and astronomy, 19%.
00:04:09.100And social sciences, 29%. So the lowest one is 19% and the highest one is double that, 38%.
00:04:18.740well that's a quite an astonishing number right it basically says that quite a sizable number of
00:04:24.760papers are being cited zero times never to be cited again they disappear into a memory hole
00:04:30.240but that also means that there are quite a few papers that have only been cited once and twice
00:04:34.840and three times so to get to a hundred citations you really are doing something well and not to
00:04:43.660engage in, forgive the immodesty, but I think the last time that I had checked, I had 17 works
00:04:52.360that had had more than 100 citations. My H index, for those of you who care, is 37, which is quite
00:05:00.240a respectable number. And my total citations, my academic citations is 5,504. But I say this
00:05:09.380only to kind of situate. Now, there are, I know of some, you know, astounding colleagues that have
00:05:16.16020,000, 50,000 citations, but I'm certainly in the, you know, probably top one, two percent.
00:05:24.120But any case, then I want to segue from that. So, when I saw that in my academic career,
00:05:31.060notwithstanding that I was doing well by the metrics of academia, I wanted to be able to
00:05:36.660reach more people just because of my personality, because of my excitement to communicate with
00:05:42.240people and so on. And so in 2008, I had fortuitously received an offer to start writing a column for
00:05:51.320Psychology Today, which is precisely meant for a wider audience, a lay audience. I jumped on that
00:05:57.840And from 2008 to 2020, I think I authored 311 articles in my psychology, on my psychology
00:06:07.160today column, resulting in, I don't know, I think 7.4 million readers.
00:06:12.420Well, now imagine that number, 7.4 million compared to the reach that you're getting
00:06:24.540I want to talk about the exciting world of evolutionary psychology and consumer psychology and mating behavior and so on.
00:06:31.640And so my first foray into the media was to, you know, comment about my strictly academic work.
00:06:39.540And then later when I became a, you know, public, political, and cultural commentator, resulting in my publishing a whole bunch of books, you know, The Parasitic Mind, The Happiness Book, The Suicidal Empathy Book, and earlier The Consuming Instinct Book, all of these are trade books meant for the general audience.
00:07:00.960then of course my platform exploded in terms of its reach and then of course I started appearing
00:07:08.680on shows like Joe Rogan's show it's now been about 12 maybe 12 years ago my first appearance
00:07:13.600and then all sorts of other shows and so today my reach is in the many many billions now it depends
00:07:22.900how you want to measure that. Just my X views on X are in the billions and so on and so forth. So
00:07:31.440again, yes, of course, it is a central feature, central responsibility for professors to be
00:07:39.380publishing peer-reviewed works that are judged by their peers, that advance their fields and so on.
00:07:45.620That's perfect and I love that stuff. I just recently published an academic paper that's not
00:07:50.780going to bring me, you know, much kudos at this stage of my career, but I still love to do it.
00:07:56.520I still find it an important part of my work. But to be able to go on my X platform, publish an
00:08:06.660article that is subsequently read by a hundred thousand people very quickly, that's not something
00:08:14.060to scoff at. And I think when I first started doing this, of course, many of my colleagues were
00:08:20.080highly hostile to it. And I discussed this actually in chapter one of The Parasitic Mind,
00:08:25.720where a Stanford colleague really looked down on the fact that I appeared on Joe Rogan and so on.
00:08:30.700Now, some of the academics are coming around, but in my view, too few are taking advantage
00:08:37.380of the incredible opportunities that are afforded us in order to be able to share our knowledge,
00:08:44.600share our thoughts, our opinions, right? As academics, you're trained to hopefully think
00:08:50.600critically. Now, you could take that weaponry and then use it to weigh in on all sorts of issues,
00:08:57.820and not only within the very small, narrow confines of your specialization. There you have
00:09:05.200it, folks. I hope you enjoyed this. Please consider subscribing to the channel or to the podcast.
00:09:11.120those are free it really helps in terms of my ability to reach more people take care everybody