Wednesday, May 23, 2007

On finding a "lost" classic

Whenever a reviewer complains that the authors of a paper have failed to cite one or more relevant references, the reviewer is almost certainly right. There are so many papers published that the probability of overlooking a relevant paper approaches 1.

I just encountered such a "lost" classic. I knew that the authors of the paper had done this work, which is relevant to my research, and I have seen the key figure many times, but I discovered to my surprise that I have never actually read the paper in question:

Newell, P. T., and C.-I. Meng (1992), Mapping the dayside ionosphere to the magnetosphere according to particle precipitation characteristics, GRL 19, 609.

I've added it to the pile.

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