Uppsala researcher is Sweden’s most cited in computer sciences
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We had a few words with Peter Stoica, Professor of Systems Modeling at the Department of Information Technology who has been ranked number 1 in Sweden and number 74 worldwide in Google's H-index in the area of Computer Science and Electronics.
Congratulations!
“Thanks very much!”
What’s behind your most impressive impact factor? Any particularly influential articles?
“To get a high impact factor you do not have to have any particularly or exceptionally influential articles, what you need are many influential - just influential will do - articles! Anyway, in my case my most influential published works, according to their citation counts, are several textbooks on System Identification, Spectral Analysis of Signals, and Wireless Communications, along with a number of articles on Array Processing, MIMO Radar, and Robust Beamforming.”
Do you have any advice for young students and researchers on how to chart a successful research career?
“I think they should work on research questions and problems that they like and that are also important, at least in their opinion. The latter qualifier is important: with the exception of solving long standing and famous research problems, nobody knows exactly the impact a solution to a certain problem will have in the future. But if you work on what you think is important - a hot theoretical topic or problem of the moment, an important practical question etc. - and you enjoy what you’re doing, then you’re fine: you have a chance to make an impact.”
“The mathematician John Tukey once said: ‘Far better an approximate answer to the right question, which is often vague, than an exact answer to the wrong question, which can always be made precise.’ The implication is that you should not waste your time on ‘wrong questions’, simply because you can find a solution easily. Instead, try to work on problems that are important, again in your opinion. You might be wrong, but at least you have done your best.”
“Journals in many fields are currently publishing 10 times more papers than 25 years ago - has the knowledge in any of those fields increased by the same factor? Not even close. Too many papers present exact solutions to uninteresting problems, and in many cases their authors were aware of this fact but they could not escape the pressure to publish. In the current crowded publication environment, the dictum ‘publish or perish’ should rather read ‘publish and perish’, unless you truly believe you have selected the right question to solve - then at least you have a chance.”
Google’s H-index is an author-level metric that measures both the productivity and citation impact of the publications of a scientist or scholar. The index is based on the set of the scientist's most cited papers and the number of citations that they have received in other publications.
Read more about the H-index and view the World Wide Ranking list here and
the Country Ranking of Sweden here
Anneli Björkman