What about being able to use direct voice when reporting related work? e.g. "Secondname invented a yabayaba". I have seen "[1] invented a yabayaba", but doesn't it look kind of odd?
Bibliography keys: It's as easy as [1], [2], [3]
21–30 of 30 posts
Re: Bibliography keys: It's as easy as [1], [2], [3]
#22"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…
It is also quite helpful to know from the first glance that e.g. [Wulf68b] is actually from, you know, 1968 so I probably can just ignore whatever ideas he had on what future directions the programming language design will take (heck, it pre-dates K&R C).
Re: Bibliography keys: It's as easy as [1], [2], [3]
#23"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.
When I see numeric citations my error rate is much higher because I rarely go and check the bibliography because it’s such a pain in the ass.
Semantically meaningful citekeys give me useful information where I need it (in the text), as opposed to somewhere 20 pages away.
Re: Bibliography keys: It's as easy as [1], [2], [3]
#24"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…
Maybe I am wrong, but isn't the argument here, that because you trust in your guess, you don't look up the key in the bibliography and never become aware of your incorrect guess?
Re: Bibliography keys: It's as easy as [1], [2], [3]
#25Two things that I don't see mentioned is that:
(a) [Name 2005] is much easier to mentally track if it appears repeatedly in longer text than [5] (at least for me). [5] is just [5]. [Name 2005] is "that paper by Name from twenty years ago".
(b) By using [Name 2005], I might not know which exact paper this is, but I get how recent it is w.r.t. what I am reading. In many cases, this is useful context. Saying "[5] proves X" could mean that this is a new result, or a well known fact. Saying "[Name 1967] proves X" clearly indicates that this is something that has been known for some time.
Re: Bibliography keys: It's as easy as [1], [2], [3]
#26I wish hackernews supported references and footnotes. Semantically tagged so folks could style them as they wanted.
It does by convention,[1] though not your second feature.
You could of course submit that as a request to the mods / dev team at hn@ycombinstor.com.
________________________________
Notes:
1. See: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...>
Re: Bibliography keys: It's as easy as [1], [2], [3]
#27One 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...
Gwern's website offers sidenotes in HTML, which I find a wonderful affordance:
https://gwern.net/scaling-hypothesis> (Scroll down to "Meta-Learning" where the notes start coming fast and furious.)
Re: Bibliography keys: It's as easy as [1], [2], [3]
#28If 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.
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.
Screen and print formats can be defined via @media rules. There are also media features which can be specified or queried of a user agent.
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/@media>
Depending on the accuracy of the client, this could well give differing behaviours for desktop, mobile, and print output. HTML is flexible, very few designers seem willing to embrace this.
Re: Bibliography keys: It's as easy as [1], [2], [3]
#29If 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?
I'd use a modal dialog in that case.
Re: Bibliography keys: It's as easy as [1], [2], [3]
#30In 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…
How does that happen