A simple question, really.

We must all have heard of an academic publication citation impact measures: pure counts, centrality, H-index. Whatever. People who write journal articles want to know how many times their papers are cited. It affects their academic jobs, their reputations, their pay. And to some extent, inventors accrue some reputational rewards from the citation impact of their patents.

But let’s step outside The Tower for a minute, OK? Suppose we had some magic way of seeing how often somebody uses a technique or a datum or a model or a theorem or an algorithm from an academic paper. By “use” I am not referring to how often somebody writes another paper.

And by “use” I mean use. People out here, in the Actual World. Making actual stuff. And then not writing papers about it. Because we’re not making the stuff just so we can write another paper.

I ask, because I find I am about to use something Nic McPhee just published with Riccardo Poli. And I realize I won’t cite them, except maybe via a blog entry or two. And surely the friends and colleagues and competitors I have who predict market dynamics professionally using genetic programming, they use GP techniques and tricks they’ve read in papers. But the authors, they never hear about it. Or only infrequently, I’m sure.

Anyway, say we had a magical way to measure those actual uses. A way to count implementations where some academic work had a real functional role.

Would the usefulness be correlated in any way with the citation rank?