When I was an undergrad, applying to Ph.D programs, I constructed a few "citational phylogenetic trees" to try and understand the state of research of this and that professor to see which I would want to work with and what their differences were. This turned out to be fairly fruitles: I could barely understand the math at the roots; tracing to the present meant that the papers either diverged 60 years ago and had almost nothing in common or diverged yesterday; and only one school wanted me and I was assigned to someone who had space.
If I'm understanding this correctly (I dropped out before doing any real research), this was an even more fruitless exercise than I previously imagined. Not only is a citational phylogenetic tree kind of hard to construct even if you look at many professors and their papers, but the really important information will not be found in citations.
When I was an undergrad, applying to Ph.D programs, I constructed a few "citational phylogenetic trees" to try and understand the state of research of this and that professor to see which I would want to work with and what their differences were. This turned out to be fairly fruitles: I could barely understand the math at the roots; tracing to the present meant that the papers either diverged 60 years ago and had almost nothing in common or diverged yesterday; and only one school wanted me and I was assigned to someone who had space.
If I'm understanding this correctly (I dropped out before doing any real research), this was an even more fruitless exercise than I previously imagined. Not only is a citational phylogenetic tree kind of hard to construct even if you look at many professors and their papers, but the really important information will not be found in citations.