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> Perhaps we need an army of (paid?) dogsbodies to manually go through every paper ever published and assess the sentiment behind each citation? This would be

> Perhaps we need an army of (paid?) dogsbodies to manually go through every paper ever published and assess the sentiment behind each citation? This would be very difficult to do. In many fields, papers are written on the assumption that the reader is really quite familiar with the topic, so the potential recruits to this army would be thin on the ground. They are busy doing other things, doing research and writing papers of their own. Unless there is a new funding agency that would hire this army, I see no way to make progress on this. And the researchers in the field would be very unhappy to see their grants cut by a factor of 2, just to fund this army. I like linkages as much as anybody else, but we use natural language in papers for a reason: the message is complicated. In my own field, I might read many dozens of papers before I found one that said another paper had been disproved, for example. And -- to raise another topic -- it's very hard to publish a paper saying that another result had been confirmed, since reviewers would reject it on the basis that we already knew the result. Besides, in many fields, citations are provided just for completeness. "Previous studies have dealt with -TOPIC- (-CITATION_1-, -CITATION_2-, ...)" is quite a common construct in the natural sciences, for example. Exactly what information can be gleaned from this is uncertain to me, beyond "-CITATION_x- CITES -CITATION_1-", "-CITATION_x- CITES -CITATION_2-" and so forth. And this citation linkage is already available.

CrazyStat 4y ago
> Besides, in many fields, citations are provided just for completeness. "Previous studies have dealt with -TOPIC- (-CITATION_1-, -CITATION_2-, ...)" is quite a common construct in the natural sciences, for example. Exactly what information can be gleaned from this is uncertain to me, beyond "-CITATION_x- CITES -CITATION_1-", "-CITATION_x- CITES -CITATION_2-" and so forth. And this citation linkage is already available. I published one paper before leaving academia. It was published in a top journal in the field and has about a dozen citations now (I get a notification email each time a new citation pops up). Every single one of them is this kind of citation-in-passing. Not a single one actually engaged with the content of the paper. I have a couple other half-finished papers that I was working on before I quit, and sometimes I think about going back and polishing them up for publication, but given the reception my previous paper received it's hard to justify the time. It's not like I need papers for tenure now.
tzs 4y ago
There's been something kind of like that in the field of law in the US for around 150 years. When you were doing legal research on a topic and found a case or statute that you wanted to use you could look that up in a multi-volume book set called "Shepard's Citations". You would look up the case or statute in Shepard's (which people called "Shepardizing") and Shepard's would list almost all the other cases and statutes that cited the one you were interested in, and for each would tell you if you if the later case or statute followed yours or overruled it. Shepard's is still around but now online, although the print edition is still around. Shepard's deals with the problem of finding out what happened to a case or statute. Another problem in legal research which was also solved with multi-volume sets of books is finding cases and statutes of interest in the first place. There were books that organized all of the law into a large topic outline, assigning codes to each topic, and books that published cases and statutes with notes summarizing what topics were covered and what the case or statute said about them, and books that indexed those books by topic. You could go into a law library to research a topic, use those indexes to find relevant cases, use the summaries to see if it is likely a case you need to look deeper into, and Shepardize it to figure out if it is still good. It was essentially a database system, implemented entirely in books.

CrazyStat 4y ago

> Besides, in many fields, citations are provided just for completeness. "Previous studies have dealt with -TOPIC- (-CITATION_1-, -CITATION_2-, ...)" is quite a common construct in the natural sciences, for example. Exactly what information can be gleaned from this is uncertain to me, beyond "-CITATION_x- CITES -CITATION_1-", "-CITATION_x- CITES -CITATION_2-" and so forth. And this citation linkage is already available. I published one paper before leaving academia. It was published in a top journal in the field and has about a dozen citations now (I get a notification email each time a new citation pops up). Every single one of them is this kind of citation-in-passing. Not a single one actually engaged with the content of the paper. I have a couple other half-finished papers that I was working on before I quit, and sometimes I think about going back and polishing them up for publication, but given the reception my previous paper received it's hard to justify the time. It's not like I need papers for tenure now.

tzs 4y ago

There's been something kind of like that in the field of law in the US for around 150 years. When you were doing legal research on a topic and found a case or statute that you wanted to use you could look that up in a multi-volume book set called "Shepard's Citations". You would look up the case or statute in Shepard's (which people called "Shepardizing") and Shepard's would list almost all the other cases and statutes that cited the one you were interested in, and for each would tell you if you if the later case or statute followed yours or overruled it. Shepard's is still around but now online, although the print edition is still around. Shepard's deals with the problem of finding out what happened to a case or statute. Another problem in legal research which was also solved with multi-volume sets of books is finding cases and statutes of interest in the first place. There were books that organized all of the law into a large topic outline, assigning codes to each topic, and books that published cases and statutes with notes summarizing what topics were covered and what the case or statute said about them, and books that indexed those books by topic. You could go into a law library to research a topic, use those indexes to find relevant cases, use the summaries to see if it is likely a case you need to look deeper into, and Shepardize it to figure out if it is still good. It was essentially a database system, implemented entirely in books.