>academia or traditionally prestigious sources. You can't really put ArXiV and "traditionally prestigious sources" in the same sentence. Any crackpot can (and does) post on ArXiV. The reason why I'd be more comfortable citing a paper on ArXiV than a random web page (as a mathematician): 1. ArXiV is the archive for papers. You put something there, it's not going away. You can't even remove your own paper once you make…
It's up to professors. I've had very important work taken by professors and published by them from my websites without attribution - even my own old professors! They think theft is fine if you aren't a fellow pirate, apparently. Arxiv is used by fellow pirates, so it's off limits, on this view.
Somebody pointed out in the Twitter thread that academics often cite unreviewed papers on arXiv. If true (cannot confirm it myself, not in academia) then the peer-review-as-a-prerequisite-for-citation thing doesn't really hold water.
Peer review is no prerequisite for citation. The first paper I looked at for an example (at the top of today's "Recent" papers in PRD), cites three arXiv entries, out of 91 references. https://journals.aps.org/prd/references/10.1103/PhysRevD.98.... Successful peer review in an upstanding journal is a signal of relative reliability and importance, but it is not the arbiter of usefulness.
Exactly. If I am sure of myself, I will cite anyone with information pertinent to my work. I am their peer and just reviewed it.
It is a fun little event that something posted on 4chan is used in a research paper. But that nobody knows how it should be cited is just plain wrong. They should maybe contact their research library and get a introduction to citing. All citation styles I know of can handle web citations. Anonymous authors is nothing new either. And you have things like the internet archive or Webcite[0] to make sure the web document…
It's not that nobody knows how to cite it, it's that nobody wants to cite things from outside of academia, perhaps because it lowers their own perceived prestige. I have seen this in computational linguistics where people frequently don't cite their data sources, which often come from outside of the field or outside academia altogether. Instead they put a link to a webpage in a footnote, which does nothing for assign…
Not citing sources is plagiarism, are you actually saying that it is the norm in computational linguistics to plagiarize? If so this is extremely worrying.
> Peer review is a base level quality check Ideally this is true. At the worst though, you'll end up with a peer reviewer that gets pedantic or one who's a member of a citation cartel [0] that demands that you cite his/her friends papers unnecessarily as a quid-pro-quo leading to publication. It's difficult to say how common this is in practice since academia is generally terrible about self-reflection, but I observe…
It's good to keep in mind that reviewers do not make the decision. They recommend the decision. The Editor, who knows the identity of the reviewer, can see if a reviewer is asking for unreasonable citations. So while this definitely does happen (and to different degrees in different fields) there are some checks and balances, too.
True, and your overall point (that it is better than the alternative; i.e. viXra) stands. It's really one of those things where ymmv depending on the field- I just happened to notice a somewhat disheartening tendency for those sorts of horse trading practices to creep in, which is ultimately one of the major reasons why I left science.
I could be naive, but my impression was that there are almost too many degrees of freedom in the peer review process that could allow for this kind of chicanery, and that it would almost be preferable to have criteria for acceptance laid out in advance (i.e., exactly what steps, metrics, and citable articles were necessary) and use those the way an actuary would. In some ways I almost think that practices like preregistration serve as a better first-pass indicator of whether or not research is publishable.
That's a non-answer. Peer review is a thing in mathematics precisely because it's difficult to verify if a proof is valid. In a sense you can say something like, "A proof is valid or it isn't", but that's vacuous because you still need someone to check it. There are many examples available of proofs which have been initially accepted but later discredited in the mathematical community. There are also many examples of…
Yes, it was a mostly non-answer to a mostly non-question. It was in response to citing a proof in your own work, not a comment on the need for peer review of proofs in general. The bulk of your rebuttal is exactly my own point. Peer review doesn't actually prove anything one way or the other. The ultimate truthfulness of a cited proof is all that matters. The idea that cited proofs should be peer reviewed don't add i…
People do use unreviewed proofs. They just mark those results separately from the rest of the paper so that people (correctly) know not to rely on them, or at least to continue to treat them as tainted; they also usually try to avoid relying on such theorems for critical results. Which is a way better solution than what you're proposing, which is to just mix them in with proofs that people are reasonably confident in and hope for the best.
You're worried about someone standing next to your car for 10-20 minutes pushing buttons and not messing up a 3125 number combo on a keypad with almost no tactile feedback?
The comment you're replying to contains: > Someone this year made a bot that did it in about 5 minutes. It's also the case that it's plausible one can interrupt & resume the sequence (at the cost of 4 extra button presses per interruption).
So you are saying that keypad entry systems are vulnerable to meth addled mathematicians?
It is a fun little event that something posted on 4chan is used in a research paper. But that nobody knows how it should be cited is just plain wrong. They should maybe contact their research library and get a introduction to citing. All citation styles I know of can handle web citations. Anonymous authors is nothing new either. And you have things like the internet archive or Webcite[0] to make sure the web document…
I don’t see any mention of Zenodo but it is a potential solution for, in their words, the long tail of science. One could post some extract from the 4chan page, post it on Zenodo and have a DOI to work with.
Didn't know about it. Seems to be more for data sets. ArXiV would be a better place for math papers.
The Haruhi problem reminds me of De Bruijn sequences, aka why I don't trust 5 button keyless car entry systems. Fords keypads do not have return keys, delays, or attempt limits. A 3125 button sequence can guarantee you will unlock the door. It would take about 10-20 minutes for someone who has practiced to break in. Someone this year made a bot that did it in about 5 minutes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Bruijn_s…
Two problems with this plan though: 1) Even when you succeed you can't start the car. 2) Even given the best case scenario you end up with a Ford.
>academia or traditionally prestigious sources. You can't really put ArXiV and "traditionally prestigious sources" in the same sentence. Any crackpot can (and does) post on ArXiV. The reason why I'd be more comfortable citing a paper on ArXiV than a random web page (as a mathematician): 1. ArXiV is the archive for papers. You put something there, it's not going away. You can't even remove your own paper once you make…
It's up to professors. I've had very important work taken by professors and published by them from my websites without attribution - even my own old professors! They think theft is fine if you aren't a fellow pirate, apparently. Arxiv is used by fellow pirates, so it's off limits, on this view.
That sounds mighty weird, and honestly the statement has certain characteritics that trigger my crackpot alarm (don’t take it personally)... If what you say is true, it’s not like you don’t have recourse — you can write to the publication’s editorial board, or report to your department or institution’s academic disciplinary body (of course, that’s after you have contacted whomever you’re in dispute with; it’s okay, and I’ve had people cold emailing me about my preprint, asking me to mention their only somewhat related and by no means appropriated work...) Also, if you produced whatever result when you were working for a professor, they can publish it under their name (it’s nice to at least have you on the author list, of course), you don’t revoke their right just by publishing it on your own website. Anyway, whining on HN is the about least useful thing you can do.