101–110 of 114 posts
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work on calculus you're obliged to cite Leibniz even if you didn't read him, but you are not obliged to cite Newton's unpublished work unless you r…
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When publishing a paper/book with a certain publisher there is an interaction between the prestige of the publisher and the prestige of the author: An author publishing with prestigious publishers is considered prestigous; a publisher that publishes prestigous authors is considered prestigous. Since publishers are commercial entities, their prestige is an asset they want to protect. So there are other incentives at p…
AKA why the academic journal industry is bullshit.
"If you haven't climbed the ivory tower you don't get to speak in the ivory tower... Also, we in the ivory tower don't listen to those not in the ivory tower. Less we ourselves are cast down from our perched position."
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> Citing Wikipedia also puts the reader in the uncomfortable position of either taking your word for something, or having to go through Wikipedia's sources themselves to verify something. How does this differ from citing anything else?
The problem is that Wikipedia is a secondary source. If I cite wikipedia you need to go through the reference list in the end of the article to find the primary source for the fact that I cited. If I had instead cited that source directly you wouldn't need to go through this extra step.
https://www5.in.tum.de/~huckle/Sutton_Spinach_Iron_and_Popey...
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Five years ago (during my PhD) I would not have been "allowed" to cite a paper which has not been peer-reviewed and published in the proceedings of a recognised conference.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.
This dissonance seems to come from the fact that citing has two purposes 1. Assigning credit to where you heard about something. 2. Giving a claim (the best possible, and sufficiently strong) support. From the credit perspective you should cite wherever you heard something, even if it was alleyway graffiti. From the support perspective, you should take the idea you read on the wall look it up to see if someone credib…
3. Show what is novel in your work. Novelty is important in many academic situations.
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What? Leibniz/Newton introduced the concept of calculus; shouldn't we credit them with this (amazing) concept just because it wasn't formalized very well until Weierstrass came along?
In my view, Leibniz / Newton did enough heavy lifting to deserve credit for developing the field. This is way different than just blurting out a "concept" without even knowing if it's workable. I'm in agreement that ideas are a dime a dozen. Sure, it's necessary to cite the first known mention of an idea, and there are situations where the first mention of an idea is important such as in the patent system. "Planting"…
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…
At least in biology, a lot of journals have been cracking down on "personal/private communication" citations lately -- the point of a citation isn't just to give credit, but to tell the reader where to find the info, and chatting with your friend isn't a realistic option for that. If it is unpublished, and is important enough to be cited, then you should make the friend a co-author and include the info in your paper.…
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At least in biology, a lot of journals have been cracking down on "personal/private communication" citations lately -- the point of a citation isn't just to give credit, but to tell the reader where to find the info, and chatting with your friend isn't a realistic option for that. If it is unpublished, and is important enough to be cited, then you should make the friend a co-author and include the info in your paper.…
I'd argue that the latter purpose---allowing the reader to recover the original sources and arguments to your thinking---is more important than the 'giving credit' one. If a conversation or email exchange with someone was indeed critical to the development of your ideas, then you offer them co-authorship, not a "citation' to something not only unpublished but undocumented. If it was only incidental to the thinking, t…
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That's mostly linear algebra, probability theory and calculus. You're going to have a difficult time self-studying all of that if you haven't had much exposure to it. Books are probably a less efficient method of learning the mathematics if you have targeted subjects you want to learn about. They're typically suited to introductions and breadth-wise coverage of fields, but once you get higher up, "linear algebra" (fo…
Thanks a lot for your comment. I do have exposure to all the three topics. I self-studied with Strang's MIT OCW course in high school, took calculus and probability in high school and undergrad. So, I'm not really looking for big introductory books for two reasons, I don't really have time to go through big books, and since I already have some exposure, it becomes hard to find new things to learn from such introducto…
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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
That's mostly linear algebra, probability theory and calculus. You're going to have a difficult time self-studying all of that if you haven't had much exposure to it. Books are probably a less efficient method of learning the mathematics if you have targeted subjects you want to learn about. They're typically suited to introductions and breadth-wise coverage of fields, but once you get higher up, "linear algebra" (fo…
The linear algebra is obviously key, and I wish we'd done more of the in my advanced high school classes instead of elementary analysis.
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The problem is that Wikipedia is a secondary source. If I cite wikipedia you need to go through the reference list in the end of the article to find the primary source for the fact that I cited. If I had instead cited that source directly you wouldn't need to go through this extra step.
Yes you would. Why would you trust the source Wikipedia cites more than you trust Wikipedia? It's not a primary source either; those are very rare. https://www5.in.tum.de/~huckle/Sutton_Spinach_Iron_and_Popey...