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Comment by seanmcdirmid | Hacker News Reader

Surely they wrote some papers in English even if they wrote their dissertation in German? Most people don’t go straight to dissertations anyway, it’s more of a place to go after you read a much shorter paper.

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Correct, that's [2]. In [2] they even say "[we] derive de main result using the approach first proposed in " and cite [1]. So the paper that everyone knows, in English (and with Bengio), explictly say that the original idea is in a paper in German, and still the scientific community chose not to cite the German original.

[1] https://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/SeppHochreiter1991ThesisAdv...

[2] https://sferics.idsia.ch/pub/juergen/gradientflow.pdf

Not to excuse ignoring the thesis, but I want to point out it's bad form to cite a supposed result from a paper you haven't even looked at (or can't read), unless you indicate (admit) you didn't read it. I have even seen it described, in a paper about the citation practices of science, as unethical. It can transform hearsay into established truth. Of course nearly everyone does it anyway when they think the chance of making an erroneous citation is low enough, and that's exactly the problem.

That's exactly my point! My whole time in the academia I have not once cited a paper I hadn't read and I think doing so is a little bit dishonest at best.

They wrote the paper in German, so honest people who don't know German can't cite it directly. This is only even worth remarking on because Schmidhuber is annoyed for missing out on those specific citations.

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