Art & Creativity Quote by Abraham Pais

Pais skewers academia with the kind of dry, scientist-on-scientist sarcasm that lands because it’s mathematically neat: he flips the metric on its head and watches the logic collapse. Citation counts feel objective, like a tidy proxy for influence. Pais insists they’re a social signal masquerading as measurement. “Relative citation frequencies” sounds clinical, but it’s really a setup for a punchline about how prestige gets tallied in bureaucratic units.

The subtext is a critique of what happens when a community starts treating bibliometrics as truth rather than as a noisy trace of attention. Citations can mean “I built on this,” but also “I’m disputing this,” “I’m padding my literature review,” “I’m signaling allegiance,” or “I’m naming the usual suspects.” By contrast, the most foundational ideas often become infrastructural: they stop being “someone’s paper” and start being the air everyone breathes. Once an insight is absorbed into textbooks, lecture notes, and shared assumptions, it can become uncited precisely because it’s ubiquitous.

Pais’s second sentence is doing double duty. It’s a joke about ambition (every researcher wants to matter) and a quietly sad observation about memory: the better a contribution integrates into common knowledge, the less visible the contributor may become. That irony is the point. He’s not arguing against citations; he’s warning against confusing the currency of professional life with the substance of intellectual progress. In a field culture obsessed with impact factors, the line is a reminder that the cleanest numbers often flatter the messiest incentives.