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This is somewhat a criticism of how contemporary citations work though. Primitive science (or even pre-publishing science) doesn't get cited because humanity f
by RC_ITR 4y ago
This is somewhat a criticism of how contemporary citations work though.
Primitive science (or even pre-publishing science) doesn't get cited because humanity figured it out before our current system was in place.
It may sound silly, but no one feels the need to cite Eratosthenes when implying the world is round.
But many people do feel the need to cite the colorimetric determination for phosphorus (an SCI top 100 paper) even though it was published 100 years ago and is generally considered “base-level science.”
It is certainly an interesting paper to read, but I’m not sure I need every scientist to read it in order to believe they know how to do colorimetric analysis.
- yccs27 4y agoPapers get cited for very different reasons, from "historically significant paper cited in the introduction" over "related work we're building upon" to "this proves a statement/theorem we're using". It might make sense to start categorizing citations in some way. Only for some categories I expect the authors to have read the cited paper. Some of them don't necessarily mean the cited paper is high quality. Some are recommended reading to understand the original paper, some are'nt
- Ekaros 4y agoI wonder what fraction of citations are there for sake of having citations in a paper. That is something we were trained for as undergraduates. Fact that we should include enough citations just for sake of it.