Bibliography keys: It's as easy as [1], [2], [3] • Hacker News Board

Re: Bibliography keys: It's as easy as [1], [2], [3]

#11

Post by creer » Thu, Jun 13, 2024, 8:15 PM UTC

g15jv2dp wrote: post #10

creer wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fair and useful. But then how well do tooltips print? Is the printed version complete? If the tooltip is just the citation or footnote, then the printout is complete.

Who cares how tooltips print? I happen to be a (millennial) academic. I cannot remember the last time I actually printed an article.

Saved the PDF? Either way, it's great that it works for you - and that's not quite yet everyone. So the author might care.

Re: Bibliography keys: It's as easy as [1], [2], [3]

#12

Post by nmadden » Thu, Jun 13, 2024, 9:08 PM UTC

One of the nice things about Tufte-Latex is that refs get put into margin notes right at the point of reference.

Edit: example https://mirror.apps.cam.ac.uk/pub/tex-archive/macros/latex/c...

Re: Bibliography keys: It's as easy as [1], [2], [3]

#13

Post by bloopernova » Thu, Jun 13, 2024, 9:38 PM UTC

I wish hackernews supported references and footnotes.

Semantically tagged so folks could style them as they wanted.

Re: Bibliography keys: It's as easy as [1], [2], [3]

#14

Post by m0na » Thu, Jun 13, 2024, 11:56 PM UTC

In many cultures, family names are high-entropy and given names are lower entropy (two random people are more likely to share a given name rather than a family name). Under this assumption, the family-name citation trend makes more sense as there is a lower chance of collisions.

For Korean and Chinese names in particular, it's sort of the opposite: family names are lower entropy (e.g. Lee, Wang, Kim) than given names, which drastically increases the chance of family-name collision. I’m a PhD student of Chinese descent, and I share a family name with lots of academic peers in my specific subfield of research, and have even co-authored with unrelated individuals who share a family name with me. Family-name citations are really ambiguous and confusing to me, so I prefer omitting them altogether and using numeric links.

Re: Bibliography keys: It's as easy as [1], [2], [3]

#15

Post by hughesjj » Fri, Jun 14, 2024, 12:17 AM UTC

dash2 wrote: post #6

"Fundamentally, the problem with this is that it's actively encouraging guesses to override the communication of ethically required citation information." This is silly. 99% of the time, if you cite Autor et al. (2013), it'll be that Autor et al. (2013). The other 1%, it'll be another David Autor paper. The case when you guess something wrong, and really it's a different author, who then gets hurt, probably happens o…

I mean, regardless of the Bibkey naming, it'll be the same content in the bibliography/citations section/appendix

Personally I hate autoincrementing numeric bibkeys for the same reason I hate them everywhere -- if you remove, reorder, or combine citations, it's a huge pita to work around.

I get if you're working in latex or something you can have the bibkeys programmatically generated, but still.

So long as the bibkey is unique and has an associated value, ill always prefer something semantically meaningful in the text.

I mean, when I see a citation, I'll read the citations regardless (if it's for work etc, casually at home I'll only read it if it seems interesting or if I'm dubious). The only way I could see it being an issue is if I've already seen the citations before and somehow I'm misremembering it or ignoring some context/nuance and I decide to be lazy and not refresh the cache, but at that point it's definitely a me problem and I don't think going to the citations and looking at the source title or excerpt there will be any better.

Re: Bibliography keys: It's as easy as [1], [2], [3]

#16

Post by nimih » Fri, Jun 14, 2024, 3:00 AM UTC

dash2 wrote: post #6

"Fundamentally, the problem with this is that it's actively encouraging guesses to override the communication of ethically required citation information." This is silly. 99% of the time, if you cite Autor et al. (2013), it'll be that Autor et al. (2013). The other 1%, it'll be another David Autor paper. The case when you guess something wrong, and really it's a different author, who then gets hurt, probably happens o…

A 1% error rate honestly seems unacceptably high if you're in the habit of reading a large volume of papers, each of which has a large volume of citations. To quote TFA, "Science involves many different error-reduction practices that take time. It's part of the job." At the end of the day, it comes down to whether you think there's value in being correct, or if you're content merely seeming correct.

Re: Bibliography keys: It's as easy as [1], [2], [3]

#17

Post by generationP » Fri, Jun 14, 2024, 4:41 AM UTC

Coming from a field where [n] routinely means {1,2,...,n}, I don't feel like the [1], [2], [3] system can win me over. But I'm ready to see some advantages it has.

Re: Bibliography keys: It's as easy as [1], [2], [3]

#18

Post by dash2 » Fri, Jun 14, 2024, 10:31 AM UTC

nimih wrote: post #16

dash2 wrote: post #6

"Fundamentally, the problem with this is that it's actively encouraging guesses to override the communication of ethically required citation information." This is silly. 99% of the time, if you cite Autor et al. (2013), it'll be that Autor et al. (2013). The other 1%, it'll be another David Autor paper. The case when you guess something wrong, and really it's a different author, who then gets hurt, probably happens o…

A 1% error rate honestly seems unacceptably high if you're in the habit of reading a large volume of papers, each of which has a large volume of citations. To quote TFA, "Science involves many different error-reduction practices that take time. It's part of the job." At the end of the day, it comes down to whether you think there's value in being correct, or if you're content merely seeming correct.

1% is my guess, and I'd call it a maximum. There is also a trade-off: when you use numbers, most people won't look up the reference at all. This means they simply don't know who deserves the credit. Or they may think a reference is more solid or accurate than it is.

Re: Bibliography keys: It's as easy as [1], [2], [3]

#19

Post by self » Fri, Jun 14, 2024, 11:04 AM UTC

esafak wrote: post #2

If your article is digital, just make it so that the full citation is revealed on hover (as a "tooltip"), so users don't have to jump back and forth. edit: Tooltips supplement the traditional reference section. They are not to be printed.

As an aside, since hover doesn't work with touchscreens (phones and tablets), it might be useful to have a typographic note next to the bibkey that shows/hides the popup on touch. What's a good note to use?

Re: Bibliography keys: It's as easy as [1], [2], [3]

#20

Post by KineticLensman » Fri, Jun 14, 2024, 11:23 AM UTC

dash2 wrote: post #6

"Fundamentally, the problem with this is that it's actively encouraging guesses to override the communication of ethically required citation information." This is silly. 99% of the time, if you cite Autor et al. (2013), it'll be that Autor et al. (2013). The other 1%, it'll be another David Autor paper. The case when you guess something wrong, and really it's a different author, who then gets hurt, probably happens o…

One pragmatic advantage of the Autor et al (2013) reference style over the [57] style is that it is much easier to use when you don't have software to automatically number references, and renumber then as new refs are added. In my career I did occasionally have to resort to manual reference numbering and it was pure hell.