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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?

#51

Post by backpropaganda »

zackchase wrote: post #6
docdeek wrote: post #2

Agree with this: if you take an idea from somewhere, cite it. There’s no cost to you personally or professionally for doing so, and you’re giving credit where it is due. >A large number of seminal works have never been published. The greatest mathematics paper of our lifetimes remains unpublished. Is this a reference to a specific paper?

Author here: Grisha Perelman's proof of the Poincaré conjecture has never been (by him, to my knowledge) submitted to or published in any journal. He decided, as is his right, that he could not care less about the professional community of publishing mathematicians or their protocols. Does not invalidate his achievement. I should note, since I am not and do not expect to be the level of mathematician that Perelman is…

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.

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

#52

Post by kutkloon7 »

skgoa wrote: post #50
kutkloon7 wrote: post #41

My masters thesis is based on a single arXiv paper. I didn't know that arXiv had this questionable reputation, but it sure explains a lot. The project is to make an FPGA implementation of a technique presented in an arXiv paper. The paper had some big gaps, so I had to spend a lot of time researching the technique, and I had very little time to spend on the actual implementation.

arXiv is just a repository for papers to make them available before they are published/peer-reviewed. Just because a paper is on arXiv does not make it bad, but it doesn't mean that it is high quality either. Typically the people in the field will know which papers are important.

It's not bad, there are just some gaps. I expect a follow-up paper which explains everything thoroughly. I feel like my masters thesis should have started after that paper.

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

#53

Post by qznc »

acd10j wrote: post #25
docdeek wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks - I remember reading about Perelman before but I didn’t realise the proof was unpublished.

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 workshop. After submission, peer-review, and acceptance the workshop committee decided that they will not publish proceedings. I could have submitted the paper elsewhere, which I find weird. Instead I published it as a techreport. However, it is now unusable for proposals, because a techreport is "not published" even if it is properly archived and went through peer review.

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

#54

Post by qznc »

SeanMacConMara wrote: post #26

How is "flag-planting" even relevant to this ? You only cite what you use and you should not be using vapid hollow flag-planting sources from _anywhere_. Someone needs a fresher course on academia 101. Is it the reviewers ?

There is a lot to be fixed about reviewers, but I have no clue how to do that.

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

#55

Post by amelius »

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…

> In a business where ideas are ideas, you should always cite the source.

Why should this not apply everywhere else?

E.g., Stripe citing Paypal for their idea, Google citing Altavista, and Facebook citing Myspace.

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

#56

Post by JustFinishedBSG »

backpropaganda wrote: post #51
zackchase wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Author here: Grisha Perelman's proof of the Poincaré conjecture has never been (by him, to my knowledge) submitted to or published in any journal. He decided, as is his right, that he could not care less about the professional community of publishing mathematicians or their protocols. Does not invalidate his achievement. I should note, since I am not and do not expect to be the level of mathematician that Perelman is…

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?

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

#57

Post by CogitoCogito »

jhbadger wrote: post #48
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…

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.…

Of course the info needs to be included in the paper if it cannot be found elsewhere. I didn't want to imply otherwise. Whether the friend needs to be a co-author is of course up to them and certainly depends on the size of the contribution, but that is beside the point of both citing the source of a certain idea and making sure the reader is able to verify its validity.

In fact, I personally lean towards often including arguments even if they can be found in sources you cite. If you can provide a much clearer argument than the source (and it doesn't detract from your own work), you should include the improved one in your work. If it is a minor detail that is both worth citing as well as easy to include, then I think you should include it to avoid requiring the reader to hop around from paper to paper to get an understanding of your work. You should make your work as accessible to the reader as possible.

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

#58

Post by sddfd »

im3w1l wrote: post #35
teniutza wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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 play when it comes why citing ArXiv is currently not en vogue.

I always find it refreshing to see how pre-print driven reserach communities like physics operate in comparison.

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

#59

Post by CogitoCogito »

amelius wrote: post #55
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…

> In a business where ideas are ideas, you should always cite the source. Why should this not apply everywhere else? E.g., Stripe citing Paypal for their idea, Google citing Altavista, and Facebook citing Myspace.

I'm not saying that it necessarily shouldn't apply everywhere else, but it's certainly a fact that in those industries the business is _not_ the idea (at least at that grand scale). The business is the timing and follow-through. Abstract ideas are a dime a dozen in most industries. The idea of providing an improved search engine, or simplifying financial transactions is relatively trivial (for each of those companies there were certainly hundreds of failed ones that all had the same grand idea). (This triviality is in contrast to the specific method--for example, PageRank--that was used in the case of Google.)

As a side note, why do you believe that it doesn't apply outside those industries? I'm sure if you asked Brin and Page, they would say they were inspired by (the limitations of) previous search engines. Ditto for Stripe and Paypal and Facebook and Myspace.

Academic ideas are (hopefully) much more specialized than these broad ideas. In business they are more comparable to patents and for patents prior art is of course extremely important (enough so to legally invalidate your legal claim to your idea!). In contrast to patents, however, there aren't strong legal mechanisms to enforce priority of ideas and that's why being honest and open about it (community policing of these ideals) are especially important. If academics were to entirely stop caring about citing their sources, academic research would probably totally cease to function.

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

#60

Post by nthcolumn »

I must be missing some nuance of the argument here. If it is nonsense then why is it in his paper? If you are citing poor quality sources then that tells us something about your paper and to not do so would be dishonest. We're not seriously saying that you should be trawling for similar ideas to your own and then citing them, just where you have used other work you must give credit.
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