Mission
Another day, another paper, and the world is counting on you again. Your mission is to estimate the impact of research in competitive game modes!
How to play
Two research papers will be shown.
Click on the paper you believe gets more citations per year.
Good luck!
Guesstimation:
A research paper will be shown.
Estimate the average yearly citations.
Use the slider or click on the input field to make your guess.
Good luck!
Challenges:
Check out sets from recent conferences and selected research institutes!
This gamemode is a mix of battle and guesstimation.
Good luck!
How points are awarded
The closer your guess is to the real number, the more points you will earn.
Citation counts are distributed with a strong skew, so a fair scoring system is based on logarithmic error.
So, getting the rough order of magnitude right will always be rewarded!
In Guesstimation, points are awarded based on how close your estimate is.
In Battle, being correct on harder comparisons (similar citation counts) gives more points.
If you are good, you may get streaks that multiply your points!
Background
Citations are a key metric in academia, sometimes used to evaluate researchers for jobs and grants. They may reflect the impact of a work, but are also influenced by the field, journal, and the author's reputation and network. Have a guess: how many citations will your recent publication get in the next months? Or take a specific publication: given only its main findings without knowing the journal or authors, how many citations do you think it got?
Some journals are famous for publishing highly cited work, but the distributions across papers can be surprising! Notice how a few publications receive a lot of citations, while most get relatively little. You can play with the interactive histogram to explore this further.
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Analysis details
random but filtered for relevant topics (Genetics, Molecular Biology, Cell Biology, Biotechnology, Synthetic Biology, Systems Biology, Computational Biology) & with abstract >100 words.
"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 & filtered for topic "Biology", not required abstract.
"cell/nature/science":
Cell, Nature, Science & filtered for topic "Biology", not required abstract.
Data Source
Publication metadata and citations are sourced from OpenAlex, an awesome free and open catalog of scholarly papers, authors, institutions, and more. It is made by OurResearch, a nonprofit dedicated to making research open, supported by Arcadia and the Navigation Fund.
Prior Art
There is a rich history of 'Games with a Purpose', where human intuition is gamified to solve complex problems. Also there are many addictive, yet very educational games. There is for instance Guess the Correlation, where players guess Pearson coefficients from data plots; games like Wikipedia racing where players navigate information quickly; citizen science platforms like Foldit (protein folding), Eterna (RNA design), and the Zooniverse platform for people-powered research. The Guess the Journal Impact Factor Challenge (Simmons & Raj, 2017), perhaps the first gamification of research impact, had players predict journal impact factors from paper titles.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank all the testers and researchers for their feedback and support! MM, GC, SB, PW, IL, AS.
About me
I am a scientist, molecular biologist, passionate about open science and improving policies in academic research, but created this here just for fun with no hope or ambition. This was a hobby project to learn more about gamification, web/interface design, databases, citation counts, and to see how far ai coding assistants can help in such a project.
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