I’ve always encouraged editors and journals that they should try and do something about identifying their, the citation classics in their field. JAMA, you remember when JAMA ran that series of articles, milestone papers, they called them and it turned out to be that many of them, but not all of them, are highly-cited classics. And I think, ISI could do it, and do it not only for highly-cited papers, but highly-cited books too. Very viable, if you think about, what the public library wanted to know which were the most cited books and they aren’t always going to be the ones that would necessarily point to what should be kept. But I can’t imagine that a citation classic book would not be kept on the shelf for quite a while. Apart from determining that something is a classic otherwise, so... A hot paper, kind of, sounds temporary, doesn’t it? I mean, it should be because it’s hot for a while. How long, does it remain hot forever? A classic, I guess, eventually becomes, a classic is important whether it’s useful anymore; it’s interesting historically, it was a classic, and therefore it’s something you should know about as an important, historical event in science; something that gets cited and is often used, clearly ought to be of interest to a lot of people. I think we have a capacity to read the titles of thousands of classics if we, if we keep at it long enough. That’s why Current Contents, you know, every week, you were getting a list of highly-cited papers. Well, how long does it take you to read that list? It tells you something about what’s going on, of all the things you could read. So, hit... lists of hits, hit lists are very popular, especially in music, so why not science? Something else I think that, that project that I always wanted to encourage in advertising – somebody ought to do more about putting out the equivalent of baseball cards for scientists. You can get card decks of scientists, so you could get kids trading in Nobel Prize winners, I’ll trade you two Joshua Lederbergs for three Albert Einsteins. That ought not to be so difficult to do; I think it would be a great thing to promote the product, some product. It’s the kind of thing that Ellis Rubinstein would probably like to do for the New York Academy of Sciences. He’s, he’s turned out to be quite a promoter for the Academy.
