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JoshuaZ comments on Follow-up on ESP study: "We don't publish replications" - Less Wrong
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Comments (50)
If this were true how would anyone ever get the first citation?
(Incidentally in my own field, there are a lot of papers that don't get cited. It isn't because the papers are wrong (although some very small fraction of them have that problem) but that they just aren't interesting. But math is very different from most other fields.)
Some papers (those written by high status authors) are ones that everyone knows will get citations soon after they are published, and so they feel safe in citing them since others are soon to do so. Self-fulfilling prophecy.
Zed didn't say you should never cite a previously uncited paper, only that you shouldn't invest time and effort into work that depends on the assumption that its conclusions are sound. There are many possible reasons why you might nevertheless want to cite it, and perhaps even give it some lip service.
Especially if it's your own.
Self-citations are usually counted separately (both for formal purposes and in informal assessments of this sort).
Because the policy wasn't applied until after a cutoff date, so the recursion bottoms out at an author from before the cutoff. Obviously. Edit: Non-obviously. Edit2: HOW AM I SUPPOSED TO END THIS COMMENT FOR YOU MEATBAGS NOT TO VOTE ME DOWN???
I don't know, but I'm pretty sure that's not it.
I think your comment is getting voted down because it doesn't actually answer the issue in question. It does allow there to be a set of citable papers, but it doesn't deal with the actual question which is how any given paper would ever get its first citation.
Yes, it does, because paper B, from after the cutoff, cites a cite-less paper A, from before the cutoff. Then a paper C can cite B (or A), as B cites a previous paper, and A is from a time for which the standard today is not applied. (Perhaps I wasn't clear that the cutoff also applies to citable papers -- papers from before the cutoff don't themselves need citations in them to be citable.)
Edit: Also, papers from before the cutoff cited other prior papers.
It's not citing but being cited, I think. So if A and B are both before the cutoff, and A cites B, then C from after the cutoff can cite B (but not necessarily A).
Personally I thought it was a good comment even before the edit.
I'm confused. I parsed this as "papers which contain no citations are considered bad sources," but it seems that everyone else is parsing it as "papers which have not been cited are considered bad sources." Am I making a mistake here? The latter doesn't make much sense to me, but Zed hasn't stepped in to correct that interpretation.
Look at the context of the first two paragraphs and the comment that Zed was replying to. The discussion was about how many papers never get cited at all. In that context, he seems to be talking about people not citing papers unless they have already been cited.
It's not clear to me that he was talking about studies being ignored because they're not interesting enough to cite, rather than studies being ignored because they're not trustworthy enough to cite.
In any case, I think both are dubious safety mechanisms. John Ioannidis found that even most the most commonly cited studies in medical research are highly likely to be false. If researchers are basing their trust in studies on the rate at which they're cited, they're likely to be subject to information cascades, double counting the information that led other researchers to cite the same study.
In the case of only citing papers that contain numerous citations, this is helpful if the papers contain many redundant citations, demonstrating that the factual claims have been replicated, but if a paper relies on many uncertain findings, then its own uncertainty will be multiplied. The conclusion is at most as strong as its weakest link.
I think that you can cite it if you really think that it's good (and perhaps this is what Zed meant by "if you must"), but you'd better be citing something more widely accepted too. Then if lots of people think that it's really good, it will join the canon of widely cited papers.
Also, people outside of the publish-or-perish framework (respected elders, hobbyists outside of the research track, grad students in some fields) can get the ball rolling.