10,000 Citations: Looking Back at My Academic Impact
I left academia in 2018 after my physics PhD and moved into industry — first Apple, then Meta. I hadn't thought much about my papers since. Recently, I came to notice my Google Scholar total had quietly crossed 10,000 citations, and I got curious: what actually happened to all that work?
The Fun Part: Tools Have Changed Everything
Back in grad school, understanding your paper's impact meant manually browsing Google Scholar, clicking through citing papers one by one, and guessing at patterns. It was tedious enough that most people never bothered beyond checking citation counts.
Today the experience is completely different. OpenAlex provides a free, open API to the entire academic graph — every paper, citation, author, and institution, with structured metadata like subfield classifications and citation percentiles. And with Claude Code, I could write queries, parse results, and generate visualizations in a single conversational flow. What would have taken days of manual work became a genuinely enjoyable afternoon project.
The combination felt like a superpower: ask a question ("which subfields cite my paper?"), get structured data back, and immediately visualize it — all without leaving the terminal.
The Big Picture: 20 Papers, 11 in the Top 1%
Here's the full summary of my publication record, with citation percentiles normalized by year and subfield (via OpenAlex):
| # | Title | Journal | Year | Citations | Top % | Pool |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Lead (1st / co-1st author) | ||||||
| 1 | Origin of fast ion diffusion in super-ionic conductors | Nature Comms | 2017 | 957 | 0.14% | 366k |
| 2 | Statistical variances of diffusional properties from ab initio MD | npj Comput. Mater. | 2018 | 459 | 0.72% | 240k |
| 3 | Crystal Structural Framework of Lithium Super-Ionic Conductors | Adv. Energy Mater. | 2019 | 166 | 1.6% | 398k |
| 4 | Accelerated materials design of Na0.5Bi0.5TiO3 oxygen ionic conductors | Phys. Chem. Chem. Phys. | 2015 | 126 | 3.7% | 232k |
| 5 | Enhanced rate capabilities of Co3O4/CNT anodes | J. Mater. Chem. A | 2013 | 55 | 3.2% | 362k |
| 6 | Computation-Guided Design of LiTaSiO5 | Adv. Energy Mater. | 2019 | 48 | 7.5% | 398k |
| Core (2nd author) | ||||||
| 7 | Origin of Outstanding Stability in Lithium Solid Electrolytes | ACS Appl. Mater. Interfaces | 2015 | 1,858 | 0.12% | 366k |
| 8 | First principles study on solid electrolyte-electrode interfaces | J. Mater. Chem. A | 2015 | 1,015 | 0.28% | 366k |
| 9 | Unsupervised discovery of solid-state lithium ion conductors | Nature Comms | 2019 | 307 | 0.81% | 252k |
| 10 | Strategies Based on Nitride Materials to Stabilize Li Metal Anode | Adv. Science | 2017 | 249 | 0.63% | 366k |
| 11 | Discrepancies and error metrics for ML interatomic potentials | npj Comput. Mater. | 2023 | 39 | 5.7% | 252k |
| 12 | First-Principles Study of Oxyhydride H- Ion Conductors | ACS Appl. Energy Mater. | 2018 | 33 | 18.9% | 240k |
| Contribution (other) | ||||||
| 13 | Negating interfacial impedance in garnet-based solid-state Li batteries | Nature Materials | 2016 | 1,978 | 0.02% | 369k |
| 14 | Electrochemical Stability of Li10GeP2S12 and Li7La3Zr2O12 | Adv. Energy Mater. | 2016 | 1,055 | 0.13% | 369k |
| 15 | Computation-Accelerated Design for All-Solid-State Li-Ion Batteries | Joule | 2018 | 384 | 0.43% | 383k |
| 16 | Super-Aligned CNT Films as Current Collectors | Adv. Funct. Mater. | 2012 | 292 | 0.90% | 351k |
| 17 | Hybrid super-aligned CNT/carbon black conductive networks | J. Power Sources | 2013 | 87 | 6.8% | 362k |
| 18 | Li15P4S16Cl3, a Lithium Chlorothiophosphate | Inorg. Chem. | 2019 | 17 | 32.9% | 398k |
| 19 | First principles study of small polarons in doped SrCeO3 | Ionics | 2017 | 14 | 33.7% | 236k |
6 Lead (1st/co-1st) · 6 Core (2nd author) · 7 Contribution (other)
11 papers in Top 1% by year+subfield · 14 papers in Top 10%
Citation percentiles from OpenAlex, normalized by publication year and subfield.
Deep Dive: Paper #1 — Origin of Fast Ion Diffusion
To see what "impact" actually looks like beyond a citation count, let me zoom into my most representative first-author paper: Origin of fast ion diffusion in super-ionic conductors, published in Nature Communications in 2017.
This paper came from my PhD work with Prof. Yifei Mo at the University of Maryland. We used ab initio molecular dynamics to understand why certain crystal structures allow lithium ions to move unusually fast — a fundamental question for solid-state battery design. The key insight was that concerted migration of multiple ions — rather than independent single-ion hopping — is the fundamental mechanism behind superionic conductivity. We then revealed the specific crystal structure features that enable this cooperative behavior, providing a unifying framework across known superionic conductors. This understanding was not just explanatory — we leveraged it to predict new superionic materials, one of which has since been experimentally synthesized.
Citation Timeline
Most papers peak within 2-3 years and decline. This one is still accelerating after 8 years — 2025 was its highest year yet with 165 citations:
Top Citing Papers
Every major review on solid-state electrolytes published since 2018 cites this work. The top 10 citing papers are themselves highly cited, collectively accumulating over 13,000 citations:
Citation Trajectory vs. Median Nature Paper (2017)
To put the numbers in context, here's this paper's annual citations compared against the median Nature and Nature Communications paper from the same year. While both medians peak and decline, this paper is still rising — at 4.9x the Nature median and 20.1x the NComms median in 2025:
"Concerted Migration" — From Finding to Standard Terminology
One of the most gratifying signs of impact is when your finding becomes standard terminology. Before this paper, "concerted migration" was a niche phrase in ion conductor literature. After 2017, its usage grew 4x — and today it appears in JACS, Nature Reviews Materials, and university press releases as an established mechanistic framework:
Cross-Field Impact
What surprised me most was the breadth. This paper has been cited across 50 subfields — from battery engineering and materials chemistry (expected) to catalysis, condensed matter physics, biomedical engineering, and even geophysics (not expected at all):
Area proportional to number of citing papers. Hover for details.
Reflections
A few things struck me doing this analysis:
- Impact is nonlinear. Out of 20 papers, just 4 account for over 60% of all citations. The top paper (not even mine as first author) has nearly 2,000 citations. Academic impact follows a power law, and you can't predict which paper will take off.
- Good work compounds. My Nature Communications paper was not the flashiest result — it was a careful, almost pedagogical explanation of a structural principle. But because it provided a framework that others could build on, it kept growing. Foundational work ages well.
- Cross-field reach is the real surprise. I wrote about battery materials. Geophysicists cited it. That kind of unexpected transfer is what makes fundamental research valuable — and impossible to predict at the time of writing.
- The tools really have changed. OpenAlex + Claude Code turned what would have been a week-long bibliometric study into an enjoyable afternoon. If you're an academic or ex-academic, I'd highly recommend doing this for your own work. The OpenAlex API is free and remarkably well-structured.
Data from OpenAlex. Google Scholar counts may be ~20% higher. Visualization generated May 2026.