Why publish a research paper when a blog post or a lecture slide can have more citation count than a journal paper? I am quite surprised to find that a lecture slide for a course has 133 citations from highly reputable researchers across the world. The main contribution of the lecture slides (which seems to be the reason for the citations) appears in 1 line on 1 page of the slide out of 30 slides. (Citation count according to Google Scholar)


Another set of random course notes from lecture 12 of a course just happens to have over 100 citations, Reinforcement Learning and Control - CS229
This 8 page course note has 200 citations, which is more than many of actual research papers
Also, another summary of a blog post (less than 14 pages) has over 700 citations (From the paper: This paper originally appeared as a blog post on 19 January 2016.)

Citation count from Google Scholar. This paper isn't even published anywhere aside from Arxiv.


What is the point of even publishing a paper and going through the painstaking process of peer review and editing if you can just write some blog post or a lecture slide on some hot topic and accumulate citation counts (which is crucial for securing funding, etc.)?
It's not fair to only look at the peak of the distribution. For an apples-to-apples comparison, you need to compare peaks to peaks and averages to averages.
The two sources you mention are both in the field of machine learning. If we assume that they correspond to the blog/lecture notes sources with the most number of citations (i.e. the peaks), then we can conclude that these venues can generate at most ~700 citations. If you compare to the most cited machine learning papers, these 700 citations are minute. For example putting &quot;machine learning&quot; into Google Scholar yields:

Scikit-learn: Machine learning in Python (journal article) -- 14919 citations
Data Mining: Practical machine learning tools and techniques (book) -- 34724 citations

What about averages? I don't know what the average number of citations a blog post or lecture slide gets, but I'd guess less than one, since many blog posts don't attract comments. The average number of citations for a journal article however is easy to find - just look at the impact factor. Putting in &quot;machine learning journal&quot; into Bing, I get journals such as Machine Learning (IF = 1.855 as of time of writing) and International Journal of Neural Systems (IF = 4.58). Clearly the average journal article gets a lot more citations than the average blog post or lecture slide.
tl; dr: What's the point of studying machine learning instead of playing soccer and earning hundreds of thousands of dollars a week? The answer to that question is similar to the answer to this one.