citations..

Yesterday at OFC in San Diego, there was an informal discussion amongst our friends on citations. Academics believe citations are important - to me it all depends on who really cites your work. One of our friends - a well known academic commented that by visiting lesser developed nations and giving talks there, the citation count increases. Methods like this and others where only your friends or other academics cite your work are really crappy. I have noticed that most of the times academics in the area will cite your work. Most of these guys will do incremental stuff and will not be in any way expanding the horizons of your community. So what is the point in measuring the citations. To me, if someone from Cisco or NSN or AlcaLu cites my work, this is more important than 100 academics citing my work. Yes I am an academic too, but we are finally all working in applied sciences - where industry acceptance is the final goal!