Eurocrypt 2001 papers citation chart
Since (but not only) I am a general chair of Eurocrypt 2011 in Tallinn, I became somewhat curious about the past Eurocrypts. The chart above is what I found about the citation statistics of papers published in Eurocrypt 2001, that is, exactly 10 years ago. The citations are counted according to Google Scholar (and may obviously be somewhat incorrect). Moreover, I only counted citations for the top match (and not say for mistyped names, journal versions, etc).
The 9 papers that have received more than 100 citations are (unordered):
- Efficient Password-Authenticated Key Exchange Using Human-Memorable Passwords
- Priced Oblivious Transfer: How to Sell Digital Goods
- Practical Threshold RSA Signatures without a Trusted Dealer
- Analysis of Key-Exchange Protocols and Their Use for Building Secure Channels
- Evidence that XTR Is More Secure than Supersingular Elliptic Curve Cryptosystems
- Multiparty Computation from Threshold Homomorphic Encryption
- The Rectangle Attack – Rectangling the Serpent
- An Efficient System for Non-transferable Anonymous Credentials with Optional Anonymity Revocation
- Encryption Modes with Almost Free Message Integrity
Anyone can guess which paper is actually the most cited one — at least I was not able to do it before Googling the Scholar.
I think even more interesting is the tail of this chart, with 39, 38, 38, 37, 32, 26, 26, 20, 19, 17 and 13 citations.
I have obvious questions: is it normal that papers accepted in a top venue have less than 20 citations after 10 years? What about less than 50? Is getting citations (having impact) important at all during selection of the papers? I know that in the case of STOC and FOCS there is severe criticism that papers get accepted based on their technical difficulty, and not on their possible impact. (I fail at finding a good link right now, but see for example here or here.) Impact *is* shown by the number of citations, so do Crypto and Eurocrypt have a similar problem? As an example, the *least* cited paper (with 13 citations) is called “Efficient Amplification of the Security of Weak Pseudo-random Function Generators” – and it’s definitely a technically complex paper.
Also, it would be interesting to know the most cited rejected papers (even without concrete names).
So many questions. 
May 5, 2011 at 19:02 |
Hi Helger,
I think this discussion is missing something significant. You write “Impact *is* shown by the number of citations…” but that doesn’t account for the fact that numbers of citations are not necessarily comparable across subfields. Even if you accept that, for similar papers, citation numbers are a meaningful tool for comparing impact, it doesn’t mean they are a good tool for comparing all of the papers that appear at Eurocrypt. Theoretically-oriented papers get fewer citations but might actually have a larger “impact” in the long run (or might not…). I think Meyers’ paper, which got only 13 citations, is a great example of a good paper on a difficult topic that does not necessarily garner lots of citations but still deserves to be on the list of significant work in cryptography for 2001. I would argue that it is a more significant paper than either of my two Eurocrypt 2001 papers, which garnered 52 and 80 citations, respectively, in the last ten years, according to Google Scholar.
To reinforce the point with more personal examples, several of my own most cited papers are not the most scientifically significant — they just happen to be more applied and hence read by a larger set of researchers.
What if you compared papers based on the number of citations they received at small set of conferences (say {Eurocrypt, Crypto, Asiacrypt, TCC, STOC, FOCS, FSE, and CHES)? I suspect that the distribution of citations would look pretty different.
Two other issues:
- Citation counts reflect name bias. I don’t have numbers to back this up, but my experience is that less significant papers by famous researchers tend to be more cited than equally (in)significant papers by less famous researchers.
- It is notoriously hard to predict which papers will have impact. Taking a few risks is normal, especially at a conference (as opposed to a journal). Having a few duds is par for the course. As I said, though, I wouldn’t put Meyers’ paper on the “dud” list.
May 15, 2011 at 02:28 |
Citations don’t necessarily indicate impact. Off the top of my head, it is not clear that any of those top-9 papers had much impact on use of cryptography, either directly or transitively (here I mean apart form other researchers reading and citing the papers and writing more papers of their own).
July 31, 2011 at 05:20 |
Interesting discussion. Is there a practical way address the issue better?