[Mezzie]

> I also think citations of your work that find errors or correct things should count as a negative citation.

Strong disagree. Given how much influence colleagues can have over one another's career prospects, how petty academic disagreements can get, admin focus on metrics like citation count, and how it's easier to prove someone else wrong than to do your own original work (both have value, one is just easier), it would end up with people ONLY publishing 'negative citations' (or at least the proportion would skyrocket). I think that would be bad for science and also REALLY bad for the public's ability to value and understand science.

> Thus the references at the end of the paper should be split into two sections: stuff that was right and stuff that was wrong.

This, on the other hand, is brilliant and I love it and want to reform all the citation styles to accommodate it.

[fho]

Which is basically the reddit up- & down-vote versus the HN only upvotes story just on a broader scale, is it?

[Mezzie]

Superficially yes, but in actuality it would be very different due to the context surrounding academic papers vs. Reddit.

Organizationally speaking, Reddit is a dumpster fire; check out the 'search' function (I'm just speaking on a taxonomical/categorization perspective, I can't speak to their dev practices).

Academic papers aren't. (They're a dumpster fire in their own ways: The replication crisis and the lack of publishing negative results comes to mind, but damn if they aren't all organized!)

There's two key differences:

1.) Academic papers have other supporting metadata that could combine with the more in-depth citation information to offer clear improvements to the discovery process. Imagine being able to click on a MeSH term and then see, in order, what every paper published on that topic in the past year recommends you read. I also think improving citation information would do a lot to make research more accessible for students.

2.) Reddit's system lets anybody with an account upvote or downvote. Given you don't even need an email address to make a Reddit account, there's functionally zero quality control for expressing an opinion. For academic publications, there is a quality control process (albeit an imperfect one). If only 5 people in the world understand a given topic, it's really helpful to be able to see THEIR votes: If they all 'downvote' a paper that would suggest it's wrong.

[queuebert]

You make a good point, and maybe there is a mathematical solution, like netting out mutually negative citations.

[Mezzie]

Maybe! Probably not that solution since it would penalize academics who are having a long-standing but intellectually productive disagreement.

I think it'd be hard to math out right now since the skill doesn't exist in the departments who'd be doing the work, but in 20 years who knows?