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Comment by ants_everywhere | Hacker News Reader

These citation games are at least decades old. The PageRank algorithm came out of the literature on ranking academic papers by citation, and many of the SEO manipulation techniques work in both cases. I'd guess it's being done on an increasing scale given the article.

As a semi-related phenomenon, I also feel like mathematicians are culturally prone to under-citation. I don't just mean that nobody cites older mathematicians like, say, Leibniz or Euler, for techniques they invented. But pretty frequently I'd read papers that really seemed like they were heavily indebted to a paper that came only a few years before but didn't appear in the 5-10 citations. Maybe there it wasn't mandatory to cite those papers, but it made it hard to chain backwards into the literature to get more context on methods and ideas. And sometimes it came off as the author trying to make a tool appear ex nihilo. I'm sure this happens in other fields too.

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My understanding is that citations are used to avoid having to argue for the truth value of a proposition, not to give credit, nor to establish some kind of chain of trust. A sort of "I assume this is true, if you want to argue about it take it up with this guy". If two papers are very similar in structure, but neither uses the conclusions of the other to support the truth of a dependent claim, then I don't see why the older paper should be cited by the newer paper.

Academic papers often include an introduction which summarises the context in which the paper is written. Consider https://arxiv.org/pdf/2201.03545v2.pdf where the paper says "For many decades, this has been the default use of ConvNets, generally on limited object categories such as digits [43], faces [58, 76] and pedestrians [19, 63]. Entering the 2010s, the region-based detectors [23, 24, 27, 57] further elevated ConvNets to the position of being the fundamental building block in a visual recognition system."

This shows the authors are familiar with the field, avoids inadvertent plagiarism, allows them to make it clear precisely how their contribution contributes to knowledge, shows people from funding bodies that this is a cutting edge and important field of research, and points readers in the right direction if they want to see earlier ideas, or ideas in a more applied context.

If among those 92 citations should be a few papers from your boss and your colleagues, nobody will see that as unusual - as long as they're at least marginally relevant.

This is a lot less true in mathematics research, where a question existing and not being trivial is enough motivation to investigate.

I would in fact argue that the trend, in "applied" fields, of justifying the importance of a piece of work by pointing out that a lot of people are doing similar work is in fact self-fulfilling. That makes it somewhat useless as a measure of importance.

Scientific context should be critical, not just descriptive.

Your claim about applied fields is not correct. When you do your research, you survey what other people have done in some subarea. You determine what has not been done. And then you do it.

When you write your paper you say exactly this in the introductory context. Here is what other people have done, here is a problem not yet solved in this area, we solve it. It saves the reader an enormous amount of time by not having to do a literature review themselves to see how the paper fits into the larger thrust of the field, and what the novelty is.

How can you justify the novelty other than by comparing to other people's work?

Sorry, just saw this.

Which claim do you disagree with? The claim that the trend I describe exists, or the fact that it is bad?

Note that what you describe is what I advocate: you explain that the question exists and hasn't been answered. This is not an argument that is based on the volume of work that exists.

It is also an argument you cannot (as an author) be trusted to make. Even if you cite everything that has been published that is tangentially related to your claimed contribution, there is no way a reviewer will know all of it, and no way a reviewer will be able to go and read all of it. So they can't determine whether your claim of novelty is correct unless they already know the entire field. The only defense against this is to encourage crisp and clear descriptions of claimed contributions (to knowledge or practice) and violently reject any overinflated claims. It is not to include an entire survey paper in the introduction of every piece of work that pushes the state of the art forward.

It does mean that the average paper is less accessible to the non-expert. It also encourages the regular publication of surveys whose role is solely to critically and exhaustively compare recent advances, and of textbooks whose role is to describe historic developments and their context. This is not something every paper should be doing.

> I would in fact argue that the trend, in "applied" fields, of justifying the importance of a piece of work by pointing out that a lot of people are doing similar work is in fact self-fulfilling.

There is one filter on this, though: you have to get funding for the work, which is a different process than getting a paper accepted. There is of course some overlap, as "people are working on this so it must be important" can be useful in arguing for funding, but funders at least potentially have other criteria in play too.

You would argue for the importance of research verbally, or in some kind of proposal document, though. There's no need to include part of that document in the final publication.

“My understanding is that citations are used to avoid having to argue for the truth value of a proposition, not to give credit, nor to establish some kind of chain of trust.”

People do this in science, politics, and church. It’s a call to act only (or mostly) on that person’s testimony. An act of faith. It’s both a red flag to watch for and a necessary aid for people.

A red flag because it’s often a sign of fallacy. I default on looking that person up along with folks that might disagree with them. Every success adds credibility. Failures mean I’ll default in a different direction if I hear their name come up. Might even dig into what other claims they have which are spreading.

Those sources who keep getting the job done in specific areas can graduate from red flag to reliable enough to default on. Only in that area for claims not to far from what they’ve been good at. If outside or a big claim, still double check. Also, be able to provide verifiable evidence of why you trust the source.

Are you suggesting it's a red flag for science/mathematics to build upon previous results, to "stand on the shoulders of giants" (as it were)? What are you proposing, that researchers should reproduce all of the results leading up to the current state of the art in their field before embarking on their own original experiments?

Edit: So, if anyone wants to build on Fermat's last theorem, it's not enough that they cite Wiles' paper proving it, but they should have to re-derive the proof themselves?

I answered your first question in my original comment. People can build reputations with good science. I’ll answer the other one now.

I think humans operate on faith in others’ testimonies way more than actual science. As a follower of Jesus Christ, this doesn’t bother me since I believe we learn the truth in multiple ways. However, science is rooted in empiricism which says any belief must be proven, independently reviewed by skeptics, and we keep using it while it seems correct. Dissent is always allowed in real science since our models (beliefs) might be useful but incorrect on some level. Whatever survives the most review with the most utility is what we should keep using.

What happens is often different. People believe something just because it was reported somewhere or had a name on it. That’s pure faith (or argument from authority). Many works aren’t just unreplicated: they can’t be replicated. Many institutions have political biases affecting their work. Many don’t allow dissent on some topics. People good at one thing often fail at another. I also see big jumps in extrapolating a small success to future, larger successes.

While common (even on HN), none of that is the scientific method in action. It’s more like a mix of science, unproven dogma, speculation, political maneuvering, and a popularity contest. The ratios of these vary by field and institution. Don’t call anything science or “proof” unless it fully follows the scientific method. And builds on premises that did, too.

It's somewhat field dependent. I would generally expect citations to be used for both purposes. That is, if someone is proposing work substantially similar to existing work, they should be expected to cite that other work and identify differences with the new work since novelty is a key component generally (although not always) required for publication in my area.

Qualifications of truth are often written into the paper too tho, so e.g. in biology paper people will cite studies, but then explain their mitigating circumstances and context and how they need to be balanced with other studies.

So while I agree that generally citations are a statement of claim and the reference given allows people to see if that statement of claim is actually supported, within the paper itself good authors also explicitly weigh the "truth value of a proposition".

You're arguing against practice in mathematics based on practice in an empirical field, though. Truth in biology is fuzzy in a way truth in most mathematical fields is not.

mm that's a good point, thank you.

My impression is that math is strange and disconnected. When I was a grad student the (large) physics department had a colloquium series that brought in speakers that were interesting to the whole department despite that department having major splits between astrophysics, condensed matter, accelerator physics, high energy physics, biophysics, etc.

There was a chemistry colloquium that I went to occasionally, partially because I had some friends in the chemistry department who were into the same quantum chaos stuff I was into, but it was clear that a certain faction of the chemistry department showed up there and the rest of them went to other talks.

The math department didn't have any lecture series which was of broad interest to the department.

Physics brought in senior people who had something interesting to say at the colloquium, but more than half of the people the CS department brought in for their colloquium (which I attended a lot later when I had a software dev job at the library) were job talks and often the people did not know what they were talking about and it could get embarrassingly bad. I was lucky to see Geoff Hinton speak before he got famous but there were times I would team up with "the meanest physicist in the world" (for real, not my evil twin) to ask questions at the end that would call out the weakness of the speaker because the audience was just not holding therm accountable.

All of the math departments I’ve been involved with have had department-wide lecture series. Actually, all of them even had regular lectures meant to apply to the entire college.

The colloquium talks do need to be pretty elementary!

SEO and CO (citation optimization) maybe rhyme for a reason.

>The PageRank algorithm came out of the literature on ranking academic papers by citation

I never made this connection, but it makes so much sense.

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