4 ms·

> When you only have 2-5 people that _actually_ read a paper But his papers got thousand of citations as I understand ... that means thousands of people read t

> When you only have 2-5 people that _actually_ read a paper But his papers got thousand of citations as I understand ... that means thousands of people read them?

robswc 3y ago
>that means thousands of people read them ahah, if only that were the case :) "read" is a pretty loose term. I think its a house of cards. When you cite something, you do so (usually) because it supports your paper, basically "X did Y and we need Y to be true for the foundations of this paper." When you cite "X", you do so with the assumption that X did their due diligence and peer review would have caught any issues... but its still only an assumption. If you had to re-create every experiment for every paper you cite, I'm not sure if one would ever actually finish their own research. I have only ever published one paper though, so take what I say with a grain of salt. It's just my experience.
u32480932048 3y ago
lol
ska 3y ago
> that means thousands of people read them? It doesn't, but that's counter-intuitive. With relatively new, relatively small citation counts, the numbers are probably indicative of the number of actual readers. But well established, high citation number papers often take on a "shorthand" role. You'll often see them in introductory sections or other supporting text with statements like "previous authors have X", "common approaches such as Y", etc. Here they often have little to do with the core of the paper, they are providing context. Now really people should have read them, but sometimes Jones, et. al. 1998 just becomes a collective shorthand for a set of ideas. As such people will quote it just because the papers they did read quoted it, etc. Often, over time, a single paper becomes the landmark for a set of ideas, and just gets cited to pull those in by reference. In theory this is the paper that "invented" those ideas, but in reality it's more complicated. Overall it's not a terrible practice, as a way to frame things, but can be error prone.
nvm0n2 3y ago
If you read papers in the less reputable parts of science (public health, epidemiology...) you'll quickly notice citations going to papers that contradict the cited claim, or which are about something totally different, or that don't contain any support for the claim within them. It's common. Peer reviewers don't notice this stuff, journal editors don't either. They might scan read the paper but they aren't checking it adversarially.
ahazred8ta 3y ago
There have been cases where an early citation had a typo in the title, journal name, date, or page number ... and then hundreds of later papers ditto the citation with the typo, indicating that they did not actually bother to get an actual copy of the paper.

> When you only have 2-5 people that _actually_ read a paper But his papers got thousand of citations as I understand ... that means thousands of people read them?

robswc 3y ago

>that means thousands of people read them ahah, if only that were the case :) "read" is a pretty loose term. I think its a house of cards. When you cite something, you do so (usually) because it supports your paper, basically "X did Y and we need Y to be true for the foundations of this paper." When you cite "X", you do so with the assumption that X did their due diligence and peer review would have caught any issues... but its still only an assumption. If you had to re-create every experiment for every paper you cite, I'm not sure if one would ever actually finish their own research. I have only ever published one paper though, so take what I say with a grain of salt. It's just my experience.

u32480932048 3y ago

lol

ska 3y ago

> that means thousands of people read them? It doesn't, but that's counter-intuitive. With relatively new, relatively small citation counts, the numbers are probably indicative of the number of actual readers. But well established, high citation number papers often take on a "shorthand" role. You'll often see them in introductory sections or other supporting text with statements like "previous authors have X", "common approaches such as Y", etc. Here they often have little to do with the core of the paper, they are providing context. Now really people should have read them, but sometimes Jones, et. al. 1998 just becomes a collective shorthand for a set of ideas. As such people will quote it just because the papers they did read quoted it, etc. Often, over time, a single paper becomes the landmark for a set of ideas, and just gets cited to pull those in by reference. In theory this is the paper that "invented" those ideas, but in reality it's more complicated. Overall it's not a terrible practice, as a way to frame things, but can be error prone.

nvm0n2 3y ago

If you read papers in the less reputable parts of science (public health, epidemiology...) you'll quickly notice citations going to papers that contradict the cited claim, or which are about something totally different, or that don't contain any support for the claim within them. It's common. Peer reviewers don't notice this stuff, journal editors don't either. They might scan read the paper but they aren't checking it adversarially.

ahazred8ta 3y ago

There have been cases where an early citation had a typo in the title, journal name, date, or page number ... and then hundreds of later papers ditto the citation with the typo, indicating that they did not actually bother to get an actual copy of the paper.