Comment by mturmon
19 hours ago
I was an area chair on the NeurIPS program committee in 1997. I just looked and it seems that we had 1280 submissions. At that time, we were ultimately capped by the book size that MIT Press was willing to put out - 150 8-page articles. Back in 1997 we were all pretty sure we were on to something big.
I'm sure people made mistakes on their bibliographies at that time as well!
And did we all really dig up and read Metropolis, Rosenbluth, Rosenbluth, Teller, and Teller (1953)?
Edited to add: Someone made a chart! Here: https://papercopilot.com/statistics/neurips-statistics/
You can see the big bump after the book-length restriction was lifted, and the exponential rise starting ~2016.
I cited Watson and Crick '53 in my PhD thesis and I did go dig it up and read it.
I had to go to the basement of the library, use some sort of weird rotating knob to move a heavy stack of journals over, find some large bound book of the year's journals, and navigate to the paper. When I got the page, it had been cut out by somebody previous and replaced with a photocopied verison.
(I also invested a HUGE amount of my time into my bibliography in every paper I've written as first author, curating a database and writing scripts to format in the various journal formats. This involved multiple independent checks from several sources, repeated several times.
Totally! If you haven't burrowed in the stacks as a grad student, you missed out.
The real challenges there aren't the "biggies" above, though, it's the ones in obscure journals you have to get copies of by inter-library agreements. My PhD was in applied probability and I was always happy if there were enough equations so that I could parse out the French or Russian-language explanation nearby.
> And did we all really dig up and read Metropolis, Rosenbluth, Rosenbluth, Teller, and Teller (1953)?
If you didn't, you are lying. Full stop.
If you cite something, yes, I expect that you, at least, went back and read the original citation.
The whole damn point of a citation is to provide a link for the reader. If you didn't find it worth the minimal amount of time to go read, then why would your reader? And why did you inflict it on them?
I meant this more as a rueful acknowledgment of an academic truism - not all citations are read by those citing. But I have touched a nerve, so let me explain at least part of the nuance I see here.
In mathematics/applied math consider cited papers claimed to establish a certain result, but where that was not quite what was shown. Or, there is in effect no earthly way to verify that it does.
Or even: the community agrees it was shown there, but perhaps has lost intimate contact with the details — I’m thinking about things like Laplace’s CLT (published in French), or the original form of the Glivenko-Cantelli theorem (published in Italian). These citations happen a lot, and we should not pretend otherwise.
Here’s the example that crystallized that for me. “VC dimension” is a much-cited combinatorial concept/lemma. It’s typical for a very hard paper of Saharon Shelah (https://projecteuclid.org/journalArticle/Download?urlId=pjm%...) to be cited, along with an easier paper of Norbert Sauer. There are currently 800 citations of Shelah’s paper.
I read a monograph by noted mathematician David Pollard covering this work. Pollard, no stranger to doing the hard work, wrote (probably in an endnote) that Shelah’s paper was often cited, but he could not verify that it established the result at all. I was charmed by the candor.
This was the first acknowledgement I had seen that something was fishy with all those citations.
By this time, I had probably seen Shelah’s paper cited 50 times. Let’s just say that there is no way all 50 of those citing authors (now grown to 800) were working their way through a dense paper on transfinite cardinals to verify this had anything to do with VC dimension.
Of course, people were wanting to give credit. So their intentions were perhaps generous. But in no meaningful sense had they “read” this paper.
So I guess the short answer to your question is, citations serve more uses than telling readers to literally read the cited work, and by extension, should not always taken to mean that the cited work was indeed read.