I noticed that some researchers in the field of applied mathematics receive high number of citations per month. What is the main reason? Is it their big research groups and self citation? or any thing else
In my experience, putting aside tricks like self-citations, the number of citations mostly depends on the size of the community of researchers working on a given class of topics. If the topic of an applied math research is related to medical applications, geophysical applications, a.i. or any other such topic, the number of people potentially interested is much higher than in the case of industrial applications which may be extremely important, but in which a much smaller number of researchers is involved.
In my experience, putting aside tricks like self-citations, the number of citations mostly depends on the size of the community of researchers working on a given class of topics. If the topic of an applied math research is related to medical applications, geophysical applications, a.i. or any other such topic, the number of people potentially interested is much higher than in the case of industrial applications which may be extremely important, but in which a much smaller number of researchers is involved.
Yes, Luca Bonaventura and Zakaria Al-Qodah , citations counting is basically a foolish thing to do, it is almost like the "likes" on facebook.
Things that are useful to a lot of people get lots of citations (reviews, compendia of data), and that is ok. Things that are really useful to do something practical are bound to be cited a lot (such as some applied math and/or computer algorithm) and that is ok, too. Anything regarding a topic that is momentarilly IN will get cited a lot, too, and that is foolish. A genial paper regarding something that nobody understands (yet) will not get a single citation, maybe for 50 years, which is sad.
Citations statistics indicate a lot about our society rather than about the cited (or not cited) content.
Apart from that, I think that mathematicians are, statistically speaking, the group with the least vanity. In this case, I rule out self-citations and similar tricks.
An article related to applied mathematics normally may have its application in many diverse disciplines thereby drawing the attention of large number of researchers from all those diverse disciplines. On the contrary, an article of a specialized branch of engineering will mostly be relevant to the people working in that specialized branch only. Hence the difference in the number of citations.