War of References
My post on Biases in References generated email and real conversations and one phenomenon that got abstracted:
- Authors submit their paper q to a conf citing a paper p very prominently giving credit for prior work;
- q gets accepted, authors submit a camera ready version with lukewarm reference to p making it sound contemporaneous;
- After a few months/years, q is submitted, accepted and appears in the journal version, references to p now missing or p made to appear irrelevant.
Labels: aggregator
posted by metoo at 4:02 PM
4 Comments:
Others, mostly laziness:
-citing a paper on the web or ArXiv as "unpublished manuscript", with no pointer;
-burying citations to papers that are very closely related among citations to many others that are not;
-citing only papers that are the "last word", maybe even where the only improvement on prior work is slightly better exposition.
I missed the reference post originally, but I think you're missing one big reason for reference changes (at least for me): page limits.
I have my wonderful 10 page paper, and then for, say, ESA, I'm forced to put it in 12 LNCS pages, which corresponds to maybe 6 or 7 normal pages. So 3+ pages have to go. I can remove some math, but I can't remove the statements of my theorems! So discussion of prior work gets cut -- I save space both in the text, and by cutting out references in the bibliography.
If you want my actual discussion of prior work, you have to look to the arXiv.
HI Michael,
You are right, there are legitimate reasons to optimize references, and saving space for a bounded camera-ready is legitimate in my books. In such cases, the full picture will be restored in the arXiv or journal version.
-- Metoo
Am I the only one who has ever been pressured to reference some particular work in some particular way, either before submission (if the person doing the pressuring is on the PC or likely to be a sub-reviewer) or afterwards (by a shepherd, or a journal reviewer, or out of band)? I might grumble and go along with it when I have to, but the first chance I get I will change the citation back to something I am happy with.
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