  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.
