In science “there is no bad publicity”: Papers criticized in comments have high scientific impact

Comments are special types of publications whose aim is to correct or criticize previously published papers. For this reason, comments are believed to make commented papers less worthy or trusty to the eyes of the scientific community, and thus predestined to have low scientific impact. Here, we show that such belief is not supported by empirical evidence. We consider thirteen major publication outlets in science, and perform systematic comparisons between the citations accumulated by commented and non commented articles. We find that (i) commented papers are, on average, much more cited than non commented papers, and (ii) commented papers are more likely to be among the most cited papers of a journal. Since comments are published soon after criticized papers, comments should be viewed as early indicators of the future impact of criticized papers.