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Perhaps it would be useful for reviewers to point out which citations do not contribute to the paper? It really is a tough problem. If someone is toiling along

Perhaps it would be useful for reviewers to point out which citations do not contribute to the paper? It really is a tough problem. If someone is toiling along in some niche they have carved out, they and their colleagues may be the only one working in that space. That leads to a lot of cross citation and self citation. That said, if you publish paper A, and then cite it in paper B which builds on that work, then in paper C you really only need to cite paper B if you're building on the work, not B and A. It might make for in interesting data set to plot out those sorts of relationships.

mehrdadn 7y ago
> if you publish paper A, and then cite it in paper B which builds on that work, then in paper C you really only need to cite paper B if you're building on the work, not B and A. Logically I agree with you, but a lot of academics seem to believe differently when it comes to citing other people's work, and if we are to go by that logic (which a lot of people are inevitably forced to do), I don't see why one should treat their own work any differently.
- ChuckMcM 7y ago
  That's a fair point. Having reviewing policies that would call that out however could hopefully push back on the behavior.
_delirium 7y ago
As a reader I personally prefer if they do a more complete set of citations, instead of making me follow up a multi-step chain to dig them up, as if I'm a compiler resolving transitive dependencies. I like little history-map sentences like: "This technique was introduced by Foo (1988) and recast in the modern computational formalism by Bar (2009); the present work uses an optimized variant (Bar 2012)." You could just cite the last paper here, which is the only one used directly, and which presumably itself cites the earlier papers. But it's more useful to me if you include the version of the sentence that cites all three and briefly explains their relationship.
- jrumbut 7y ago
  That kind of sentence is gold. Often half or (much) more of the value of a paper is in the references, and that's not a bad thing. Sometimes it is the first thing I read. There's no ink shortage, no link limit on the Internet, and every paper has an abstract for quick filtering. As a curious person I want everything that serves to establish the argument cited so I can be guided to papers of interest and get a better idea of where an idea fits in the broader field.
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mehrdadn 7y ago

> if you publish paper A, and then cite it in paper B which builds on that work, then in paper C you really only need to cite paper B if you're building on the work, not B and A. Logically I agree with you, but a lot of academics seem to believe differently when it comes to citing other people's work, and if we are to go by that logic (which a lot of people are inevitably forced to do), I don't see why one should treat their own work any differently.

ChuckMcM 7y ago
That's a fair point. Having reviewing policies that would call that out however could hopefully push back on the behavior.

_delirium 7y ago

As a reader I personally prefer if they do a more complete set of citations, instead of making me follow up a multi-step chain to dig them up, as if I'm a compiler resolving transitive dependencies. I like little history-map sentences like: "This technique was introduced by Foo (1988) and recast in the modern computational formalism by Bar (2009); the present work uses an optimized variant (Bar 2012)." You could just cite the last paper here, which is the only one used directly, and which presumably itself cites the earlier papers. But it's more useful to me if you include the version of the sentence that cites all three and briefly explains their relationship.

jrumbut 7y ago
That kind of sentence is gold. Often half or (much) more of the value of a paper is in the references, and that's not a bad thing. Sometimes it is the first thing I read. There's no ink shortage, no link limit on the Internet, and every paper has an abstract for quick filtering. As a curious person I want everything that serves to establish the argument cited so I can be guided to papers of interest and get a better idea of where an idea fits in the broader field.

deleted 7y ago

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