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Using vague terms like "obvious" or "standard techniques" is doubtless wrong, but I would not see any problem in a paper basing its conclusions on demonstration

Using vague terms like "obvious" or "standard techniques" is doubtless wrong, but I would not see any problem in a paper basing its conclusions on demonstrations from a source listed in the bibliography, except that in many cases those who read the paper are unable to obtain access to the works from the bibliography. Even worse is when the bibliography contains abbreviated references, from which it is impossible to determine the title of the quoted book or research paper or the name of the publication in which it was included, and googling does not find any plausible match for those abbreviations. In such cases it becomes impossible to verify the content of the paper that is read.

XorNot 2y ago
This is a wider problem in general and an odd bit of history: scientific papers pre-date the internet, and as such the reference system exists pre-computation. the DX-DOI system is a substantial improvement, but it's not the convention or expectation - and IMO also insufficient. Realistically, all papers should just be including a list of hashes which can be resolved exactly back to the reference material, with the conventional citation backstopping that the hash and author intent and target all match. But that runs directly into the problem of how the whole system is commercialized (although at least requiring publishers to hold proofs they have a particular byte-match for a paper on file would be a start). Basically we have a system which is still formatted around the limitations of physical stacks of A4/Letter size paper, but a scientific corpus which really is too broad to only exist in that format.
- smj-edison 2y ago
  The issue with hashing is that it's really tricky to do that with mixed media. Do you hash the text? The figures? What if it's a PDF scan of a different resolution? I think it's a cool idea—but you'd have to figure out how to handle other media, metadata, revisions, etc, etc.
jll29 2y ago
DOIs fix that.

XorNot 2y ago

This is a wider problem in general and an odd bit of history: scientific papers pre-date the internet, and as such the reference system exists pre-computation. the DX-DOI system is a substantial improvement, but it's not the convention or expectation - and IMO also insufficient. Realistically, all papers should just be including a list of hashes which can be resolved exactly back to the reference material, with the conventional citation backstopping that the hash and author intent and target all match. But that runs directly into the problem of how the whole system is commercialized (although at least requiring publishers to hold proofs they have a particular byte-match for a paper on file would be a start). Basically we have a system which is still formatted around the limitations of physical stacks of A4/Letter size paper, but a scientific corpus which really is too broad to only exist in that format.

smj-edison 2y ago
The issue with hashing is that it's really tricky to do that with mixed media. Do you hash the text? The figures? What if it's a PDF scan of a different resolution? I think it's a cool idea—but you'd have to figure out how to handle other media, metadata, revisions, etc, etc.

jll29 2y ago

DOIs fix that.