What is Guess The Citations?

A free web game where you try to guess which research paper gets more citations per year.

How to Play

You will see the titles of two research papers. Guess which one has more citations per year. You have the option to see the abstract too. Time is limited, so trust your gut! Once you know the drill, go and complete all the special challenges! These cover specific research areas.

Play in groups

Compete in groups by entering up to 3 optional group tags, either when you first enter your name or later in settings or on the leaderboards page. You can also create direct links for events, for example https://guess-the-citations.org/play?tag=grouptag26; prefills the group tag with #grouptag26.

Background

Citations are sometimes used to measure how research has influenced its field. More citations suggest greater impact. But citation counts don't tell the whole story and might be a bad proxy for impact. They can be shaped by many factors: the discipline, the journal, the reputation of the authors, or ungrounded hype. That's what makes guessing them so tricky!

Some journals are known for publishing highly cited work. But when you look at the data, most publications get relatively few citations, only a few receive many. This results in a skewed distribution with a very long tail:

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To explore this more you can play with the interactive histogram below. You can select a base dataset (random, 25 popular journals, cell/nature/science) and filter by journal or keywords.

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Analysis details

Journal groupings

random
- any journal
- filtered for topics Genetics, Molecular Biology, Cell Biology, Biotechnology, Synthetic Biology, Systems Biology, Computational Biology
- abstract length > 50 words
- last 3 years.

25 popular journals
- Nature, Nature Genetics, Nature Biotechnology, Nature Methods, Nature Cell Biology, Nature Structural & Molecular Biology, Nature Microbiology, Nature Medicine, Nature Neuroscience, Nature Immunology, Molecular Systems Biology, Nature Communications, Molecular Cell, Cell, Cell Stem Cell, Developmental Cell, Cell Systems, Cell Reports, Science, Science Advances, EMBO Journal, Genes & Development, RNA, Elife - equal number publications from each
- topic Biology
- abstract length > 50 words
- last 5 years.

cell/nature/science
- Cell, Nature, Science - equal number publications from each
- topic Biology
- abstract length > 50 words
- last 5 years.

How scoring works

We use citations per year to make fairer comparisons between papers of different ages.

citations per year = total citations / years since publication

This is calculated exactly based on days since publication / 365.25. Main caveat: this does not account for sub-field differences (biochemistry vs computational biology), or that older papers might have accumulated citations differently over decades.

Data Source

Publication data and citations are sourced from OpenAlex, an awesome free (with limits) and open catalog of scholarly papers, authors, and institutions. It is made by OurResearch, a nonprofit, dedicated to open science, and supported by Arcadia and Navigation Fund. Some publishers do not share abstracts openly or actively restrict their use, but this is the best openly available data source.

Inspired by

About me

As a molecular biologist, I’ve seen how much weight is put on citations. I am passionate about open science and improving policies in academic research, but this here is just for fun, with no hope or ambition :) It's a hobby project to learn about citation counts, gamification, and web development. Grateful to all testers and supporters: MM, AS, IL, GC, PW, SB, MS.

koamaru@guess-the-citations.orgdonate
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