[adrian_b]

In the research papers of any branch of science and technology, crediting the previous work is not some social convention, but it is very useful information for readers.

Despite the fact that there are some dishonest researchers, who attempt to create the illusion that their work is revolutionary and does not owe anything or only very little to predecessors, the truth is that almost anything novel that is published today contains only a few percent of truly new ideas that are grafted on a big body that combines many results extracted for older works.

If a new research paper separates properly its new elements from the old elements, which are properly attributed, enabling the search of the original sources, that can help a lot the readers to understand it.

I consider the fact that when you ask a question to an LLM, it is unable to accurately provide the source of the answer, as their greatest defect.

[Lerc]

>In the research papers of any branch of science and technology, crediting the previous work is not some social convention, but it is very useful information for readers.

I covered that aspect. Those are thing that the writer does to increase the utility of their work. It is one of many ways that improvements may be done. That this particular way is compulsory and the others are not suggests that this is not the reason for the choice to make it compulsory.