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When I was a grad student, I was explicitly advised to make such citations uncritical. Instead of saying, "Researchers A, B, and C failed to consider cases X, Y
by derf_ 11y ago
When I was a grad student, I was explicitly advised to make such citations uncritical. Instead of saying, "Researchers A, B, and C failed to consider cases X, Y, and Z, which we address here," you would say, "Researchers A, B, and C solved this problem under the assumptions that X, Y, and Z were not issues. We extend their work here to handle these cases." That is, you say what they achieved, rather than what they didn't.
Everyone wins with this approach. Sure, those lazy bums didn't consider cases X, Y, and Z, but then no one else had solved the problem regardless of whether or not they handled X, Y, or Z. That's how A, B, and C's results got published!
You're building on their work. You look better for acknowledging it rather than trying to knock down those who came before. They are likely to be respected quite a bit better than you are. Also, researchers A, B, and C are the most likely candidates to be reviewing your paper. So there's that.
This is, of course, orthogonal to the issue of unreproducible experimental results.
- pzs 11y agoI agree with you. You can and should point out shortcomings of work done by others in a respectful way. Even turn it around, if possible, as your example shows. Sometimes, however, there is no easy way to avoid saying what is missing. As an example, consider the case when the published research, without giving any explicit justification, does not address one aspect of a problem that the other researcher working in the same area finds important. But even in that case, you should not fail to acknowledge the work that you are building on. As another comment suggests my interpretation of 'negative citation' is probably less strict. I considered negative even the case of pointing out a shortcoming in a polite way, without questioning the validity of the work in a confrontative manner.
- refurb 11y agoAs others have mentioned scientists tend to be pretty humble. Even when a previous paper was completely wrong (say a chemical structure was incorrect) very rarely do follow-up papers make a negative comment. They usually say "our results differ and this is why we think we're correct". I think a part of it too is that it's not hard to be fooled by your own results. Even a relatively innocuous error or failure to notice something in the date is really easy to do. I think follow-up papers are less critical since scientists can understand why the original paper was wrong.