41–50 of 114 posts
The project is to make an FPGA implementation of a technique presented in an arXiv paper. The paper had some big gaps, so I had to spend a lot of time researching the technique, and I had very little time to spend on the actual implementation.
There are two kinds of "cite" here. Citing a non-academic source is different from citing a (published) paper; you should cite anything that precedes your work in the second sense, whereas the first is only obligatory for work that you actually took something from. If you work on calculus you're obliged to cite Leibniz even if you didn't read him, but you are not obliged to cite Newton's unpublished work unless you r…
In CS that almost certainly isn't true. I'm most familiar with the NLP field, but there, if you have some kind of embedding of your words/tokens/sentences/something you cite https://arxiv.org/pdf/1301.3781.pdf (Word2Vec, Mikolov).
That paper says there is a follow up paper published at NIPS2013, but I don't think I've ever seen that published.
The field just moves too fast to wait for conferences anymore.
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Include the next sentence for the first quote: Yes, of course. Any time that our work follows, copies, or borrows ideas from other people, and when we can reasonably be expected to be aware of this, we ought to cite the related work. Something being on arXiv or in a blog post or … doesn't excuse not citing it if it influenced your work. It's important to document where your ideas and data come from, both to give cred…
> The second quote is about stuff that didn't influence your work. While you are expected to keep up with and document related developments, forcing authors to constantly update references to new, not yet properly evaluated work just because it makes some related claim doesn't make sense. It doesn't say that though, it just says that you shouldn't have to cite nonsense on arXiv. This implies that you can read a paper…
The context seems pretty clear to me. Your example clearly is covered by the first case: if it influenced your work, you cite it, even if it is "nonsense". You can't just "decide" something didn't have influence if it had. (These rules do not prevent cheating, they are guides for people acting ethically)
The second rule is to prevent the opposite case: You shouldn't be forced to create the impression your work is based on or just a mere repeat of someone else's "who had the idea first" when they have no good claim to that, or inferior to something that hasn't been shown to be actually better.
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> The second quote is about stuff that didn't influence your work. While you are expected to keep up with and document related developments, forcing authors to constantly update references to new, not yet properly evaluated work just because it makes some related claim doesn't make sense. It doesn't say that though, it just says that you shouldn't have to cite nonsense on arXiv. This implies that you can read a paper…
> Many reviewers are abusing the system and asking for ridiculous comparison to recently-posted preprint papers. Bald-faced flag-planting should not be rewarded. And we should not be faulted by reviewers for failing to compare against 2-week old algorithms that may or may not work. The context seems pretty clear to me. Your example clearly is covered by the first case: if it influenced your work, you cite it, even if…
The question here is whether you should cite something which you did read, and does relate to your work, even if it's a shitty flag-planting paper.
If you think it's shitty, then you can cite and dismiss it in a sentence. You can dismiss 30 papers in a single sentence if you like. There's no requirement to wax lyrical for 3 paragraphs about a paper just because it was first. But it strikes me as dishonest to advocate that sole researchers become arbiters of a paper's merit, citing or not citing it at their personal discretion.
Also, if their paper was published first then that's the only claim necessary to demonstrate that they were first out with the idea.
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It's clear enough to me. In a well written article, he's advocating a middle way. On the one hand, if you borrow an idea from another person or source, then you should cite it. Just because it's only the arXiv doesn't give you a pass not to. On the other hand, "flag-planting" articles are not something that you borrow from so you don't have to cite them - and you shouldn't as the practice should not be rewarded. As `…
But this implies that you could re-implement/modify/publish something from a paper and just not cite it because you deem it to be nonsense. That's surely dishonest. If you've read something which closely relates to your work then it's your responsibility to make this clear, whether you like the paper or not. If it doesn't relate to your work, or you haven't read it, then obviously it needn't be cited.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Many reviewers are abusing the system and asking for ridiculous comparison to recently-posted preprint papers. Bald-faced flag-planting should not be rewarded. And we should not be faulted by reviewers for failing to compare against 2-week old algorithms that may or may not work. The context seems pretty clear to me. Your example clearly is covered by the first case: if it influenced your work, you cite it, even if…
I don't get the distinction. Nobody expects you to cite something which you didn't read, or which didn't influence your work. The question here is whether you should cite something which you did read, and does relate to your work, even if it's a shitty flag-planting paper. If you think it's shitty, then you can cite and dismiss it in a sentence. You can dismiss 30 papers in a single sentence if you like. There's no r…
> Also, if their paper was published first then that's the only claim necessary to demonstrate that they were first out with the idea.
To quote myself: impression your work is based on or just a mere repeat of someone else's, not just being first. Ideally, everyone looking at you referencing it would take note that it was published months after you started work and your work was independent (or even earlier), but that easily gets lost.
Should you be encouraged to throw out every idea and snippet to arXiv just so you can claim "FIRST!" in case it turns out to be useful/true, over "competing" works that spent more effort on quality and verification and are now in peer-review forced to reference you as the pioneer (even if you maybe had the idea months later, but rushed it out and got lucky with it holding up)? That's what the "flagplanting" is about.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
But this implies that you could re-implement/modify/publish something from a paper and just not cite it because you deem it to be nonsense. That's surely dishonest. If you've read something which closely relates to your work then it's your responsibility to make this clear, whether you like the paper or not. If it doesn't relate to your work, or you haven't read it, then obviously it needn't be cited.
I'm with `detaro - see her/his well-written answer to your follow up.
To take an example, read the article linked to in the OP's. The author describes how terrible two papers are (implying that they're not worth citing) only for one paper's author, and other researchers, to come on and tell him why he's wrong about his interpretation and understanding. This leads to him retracting his claim that it wasn't worthy of merit.
So immediately you have an example of a sole researcher deeming himself to be the only judge of merit necessary, only to be wrong. His judgment has a 50% failure rate already, and that's with him cherry-picking 'bad' papers.
This position can't be advocated.
I am astounded that people would question citing an arxiv paper. If you get an idea from somewhere else, you cite it. This doesn't even have to do with the archive. I have on multiple occasions read papers where the author wrote a proof and then cited "private communications" with another mathematician as the source. In a business where ideas are ideas, you should always cite the source. Anything else is extremely di…
I've been told a rule of thumb is that if a related unrefereed arxiv paper has been cited six or more times, with the justification being that this means it is somewhat well known once it has some citations.
My masters thesis is based on a single arXiv paper. I didn't know that arXiv had this questionable reputation, but it sure explains a lot. The project is to make an FPGA implementation of a technique presented in an arXiv paper. The paper had some big gaps, so I had to spend a lot of time researching the technique, and I had very little time to spend on the actual implementation.