The Story Behind My First Research Citation

Every researcher's journey has a memorable milestone — receiving the first citation. For me, that moment came through our work on the SerendibCoins dataset.

Eventually, our work was published as an arXiv preprint titled 'SerendibCoins: Exploring The Sri Lankan Coins Dataset'. Publishing the research itself was already a rewarding achievement.

However, one of the most meaningful moments came later — when I noticed the first citation on my Google Scholar profile. That single citation may seem small in number, but it represents something very important: another researcher somewhere in the world found value in our work.

For an early-career researcher, that moment is incredibly motivating. It is a reminder that research contributions, no matter how small they seem at the beginning, can support the work of others and contribute to the global knowledge community.

This first citation marks the beginning of my research journey, and it motivates me to continue working on impactful machine learning and computer vision research in the future.