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by semi-extrinsic 189 days ago
It's also a consequence of the sheer number of building blocks which are involved in modern science.

In the methods section, it's very common to say "We employ method barfoo [1] as implemented in library libbar [2], with the specific variant widget due to Smith et al. [3] and the gobbledygook renormalization [4,5]. The feoozbar is solved with geometric multigrid [6]. Data is analyzed using the froiznok method [7] from the boolbool library [8]." There goes 8, now you have 2 citations left for the introduction.
1 comments
stdbrouw 189 days ago
Do you still feel the same way if the froiznok method is an ANOVA table of a linear regression, with a log-transformed outcome? Should I reference Fisher, Galton, Newton, the first person to log transform an outcome in a regression analysis, the first person to log transform the particular outcome used in your paper, the R developers, and Gauss and Markov for showing that under certain conditions OLS is the best linear unbiased estimator? And then a couple of references about the importance of quantitative analysis in general? Because that is the level of detail I’m seeing :-)
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semi-extrinsic 189 days ago
Yeah, there is an interesting question there (always has been). When do you stop citing the paper for a specific model?

Just to take some examples, is BiCGStab famous enough now that we can stop citing van der Vorst? Is the AdS/CFT correspondence well known enough that we can stop citing Maldacena? Are transformers so ubiquitous that we don't have to cite "Attention is all you need" anymore? I would be closer to yes than no on these, but it's not 100% clear-cut.

One obvious criterion has to be "if you leave out the citation, will it be obvious to the reader what you've done/used"? Another metric is approximately "did the original author get enough credit already"?

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stdbrouw 188 days ago
Yeah, I didn't want to be contrary just for the sake of it, the heuristics you mention seem like good ones, and if followed would probably already cut down on quite a few superfluous references in most papers.
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