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Do I really have to cite an arXiv paper?

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Re: Do I really have to cite an arXiv paper?

#61

Post by backpropaganda »

JustFinishedBSG wrote: post #56
backpropaganda wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey Zack, are there any intermediate/advanced "mathematics for machine learning" books you'd recommend? I find the classic recommendations are not exhaustive enough to cover the kind of math recent papers have started getting into.

This is very vague. Can you specify what math you are looking for?

The kind of math that would be necessary to understand papers like [1][2][3][4].

[1]: https://arxiv.org/abs/1703.04933 [2]: https://arxiv.org/abs/1701.07875 [3]: https://arxiv.org/abs/1706.01350 [4]: https://arxiv.org/abs/1512.04860

Re: Do I really have to cite an arXiv paper?

#62

Post by semi-extrinsic »

teniutza wrote: post #22
hyperion2010 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the academy it would be legitimate grounds for an academic misconduct case.

When I started my PhD I was even told not to cite book, regardless of their footprint in the field. They are/were regarded as some sort of "common knowledge". Many ideas come from such works, but one cannot cite them and must, instead, cite a previous work (which surely got their (base)ideas from the same books...). What I'm saying here is that the "academic code of conduct" is a bit outdated.

Again, it depends on the purpose of the citation. I believe no-one would have a problem with e.g.

"To solve this discretized Poisson equation we use the BiCGStab method \cite{vanLeersPaperAboutBiCGStab}, which is an iterative Krylov method; see \cite{SaadsTextbook} for a general introduction."

Re: Do I really have to cite an arXiv paper?

#63

Post by sytelus »

The main problem is giant publication latency. Typically there is at least 6 months delay by the time you submit paper, it gets reviewed and then actually published with proper DOI etc. These days 6 months is loooong time.

I wish there was some way to generate all relevant bib information as soon as paper gets accepted which then can be added on arxiv immediately. This would allow folks to distinguish between peer reviewed papers vs those which are submitted only for flag planting.

Re: Do I really have to cite an arXiv paper?

#64

Post by mannykannot »

anjc wrote: post #47
delhanty wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm with `detaro - see her/his well-written answer to your follow up.

I did, I don't get it though. I think it's dishonest to read something and decide yourself that it's not worth mentioning, even if your work relates to it in some manner. 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 hi…

> So immediately you have an example of a sole researcher deeming himself to be the only judge of merit necessary, only to be wrong.

If you have chosen to publish on arXiv, then you have chosen to step out of the peer-review route. The author of the linked article did not deem himself to be the only judge of merit necessary, his position as sole reviewer came about through the decision of the papers' authors to publish on arXiv, and it seems the article's author would have preferred it if the papers had been well-reviewed before publication. You are not advocating for arXiv papers to be immunized from evaluation, are you?

It seems that we are rediscovering why the peer-review process, with all its flaws, was created in the first place. Complex problems rarely have simple solutions.

Re: Do I really have to cite an arXiv paper?

#65

Post by matwood »

CogitoCogito wrote: post #13

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 agree, and am surprised if something should be cited is even a question. IMO, not citing is dishonest and/or shows laziness in the research.

Re: Do I really have to cite an arXiv paper?

#66

Post by matwood »

qznc wrote: post #53
acd10j wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the logic that his work is unpublished itself is wrong, he published/posted his work for world to see in arXiv , He has very strong opinions about current scientific publishing status quo, hence did not go through usual route of submitting in journal, He did published/posted on arXiv. Who are we to decide that posting your work in Blog post , arXiv etc does not constitute published.

It becomes a problem if the people with the money want it. Grant proposals usually require you to list your important and relevant "published" papers. There is actually two aspects about "published". One is archival, so people can expect to access the work decades later (if they have to pay for that is another discussion). The second aspect is peer-review aka quality control. Personally, I once submitted a paper to a…

> However, it is now unusable for proposals, because a techreport is "not published" even if it is properly archived and went through peer review.

IMO, the definition of 'published' is a huge issue. I have always read published as archived peer reviewed research. Your paper is both, but remains in an not published state which I think is wrong and hinders future research.

Re: Do I really have to cite an arXiv paper?

#67

Post by yorwba »

backpropaganda wrote: post #61
JustFinishedBSG wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is very vague. Can you specify what math you are looking for?

The kind of math that would be necessary to understand papers like [1][2][3][4]. [1]: https://arxiv.org/abs/1703.04933 [2]: https://arxiv.org/abs/1701.07875 [3]: https://arxiv.org/abs/1706.01350 [4]: https://arxiv.org/abs/1512.04860

You should keep in mind that probably none of those machine-learning researchers has studied only math specific to that domain, so their papers are likely to include whatever math they have a background in, plus any new techniques they had to learn to get their results.

That said, everything I saw in the papers you linked was linear algebra, calculus or probability theory plus the usual smattering of background notation and set theory.

Once you have a solid background in those areas, it is likely more productive to look up the specific concepts mentioned in a paper (such as the Kullback-Leibler divergence or the Bellman equation), because by then you are probably too deep in the woods to find one resource that adequately covers all those different directions.

Re: Do I really have to cite an arXiv paper?

#68

Post by tome »

teniutza wrote: post #30
petters wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. You always cite your source. Period. Sometimes you also cite sources to help the reader. E.g., I have cited Wikipedia articles for basic concepts in peer-reviewed articles.

Five years ago (during my PhD) I would not have been "allowed" to cite a paper which has not been peer-reviewed and published in the proceedings of a recognised conference. Papers on arXiv where specifically black-listed. Mentioning Wikipedia (even off the record, in personal meetings) would have been the start of fast road to the bottom.

You couldn't even cite it as "in preparation"?

Re: Do I really have to cite an arXiv paper?

#69

Post by closed »

teniutza wrote: post #30
petters wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. You always cite your source. Period. Sometimes you also cite sources to help the reader. E.g., I have cited Wikipedia articles for basic concepts in peer-reviewed articles.

Five years ago (during my PhD) I would not have been "allowed" to cite a paper which has not been peer-reviewed and published in the proceedings of a recognised conference. Papers on arXiv where specifically black-listed. Mentioning Wikipedia (even off the record, in personal meetings) would have been the start of fast road to the bottom.

By your advisor? I'm surprised, because most fields have standards for citing posters, websites, and misc digital media, which are not peer reviewed.

Re: Do I really have to cite an arXiv paper?

#70

Post by escape_goat »

petters wrote: post #18
CogitoCogito wrote: post #13

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…

Yes. You always cite your source. Period. Sometimes you also cite sources to help the reader. E.g., I have cited Wikipedia articles for basic concepts in peer-reviewed articles.

Oh snap. :D

I couldn't resist writing that so I read the article looking for something substantive to include as a sop to my conscience.

He didn't contextualize or establish the existence of the problem to my satisfaction. A naive reader would assume that he is that he is arguing against academics who feel literally entitled to plagiarize pre-print publications. I don't buy it. I suspect that the actual debate he's engaged in involves is better characterized by the following three quotes:

"…many authors are peeved, pricked, piqued, and provoked by requests from reviewers that they cite papers which are only published on the arXiv preprint"

"Any time that our work follows … ideas from other people, and when we can reasonably be expected to be aware of this, we ought to cite the related work."

"If similar work comes to our attention during a proper literature review, we ought to cite it."

To which the counter-argument would the following, in his closing passage:

"Many reviewers are abusing the system and asking for ridiculous comparison to recently-posted preprint papers…"

This acknowledgement comes too late to be given any useful answer, even though one can easily see it to be the core of a real problem; the reviewers, after all, are serving as gatekeepers to publication, and if one should not put "too much faith in … the overworked cohort of peer reviewers, roughly 30% of whom typically fail to even comprehend the basic outline of the paper," then it is probably extremely frustrating when someone insists that you cite papers that you haven't read in your bibliography as 'related literature', let alone papers you have read and dismissed as insufficiently important to refer your reader to, let alone papers that were clearly written by the reviewer's pet pony in crayon on a stable wall before being photographed and uploaded to the arXiv as uncompressed IMG files.

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