Lessons learned from the JACS Challenge

Scholarly Publishing How do we gauge the importance of a scientific publication? Citation counts are, by their nature, crowdsourced, but their inherent meaning is somewhat unclear. To explore this question in more depth, Borchardt et al. asked chemists in a survey to look back at a 10-year-old issue of the Journal of the American Chemical Society ( JACS ) and predict, without checking, which three papers had been most highly cited. Respondents were also asked which papers they construed as most important and which they would share with other chemists or the public more broadly. Citations not only proved rather hard to predict, but also correlated poorly with the papers chosen to share. PLOS ONE 13 , e0194903 (2018).