Re: Why COPY != SIMULATED COPY

[Jonathan S. Shapiro]

On Thu, 2005-10-20 at 15:44 +0200, Alfred M. Szmidt wrote:
>    The fact that the L4 papers are sloppy about citations is not a
>    minor thing. It has potentially serious negative career impact on
>    other researchers.
> 
> Many branches of science (computing science is one) depend too much on
> _incorrect_ citation, and will cite papers that have no relevance to
> the actual article just to boost a fellows `citation count'.  One
> should cite what is relevant and what was _actually_used_, and the UKA
> people have done that.

I agree with what you say -- except the last bit. Citation of origin of
ideas is also essential. Hermann, Jochen, and Gernot have *all* agreed
at various times that their groups really need to do better about this.
The problem, in essence, is that scholarship is hard work, and there is
too much hard work to go around already. This is equally true on program
committees, which is why papers that do not meet proper standards of
origin citation are too often accepted.

For example, the selective revocation idea was first codified in Dave
Redell's thesis in 1974, but most people do not know this. The idea
itself had been "in the air" for a long time by then. One reason that it
is hard to trace this idea to its origin is that various authors in the
early stages of that work did not cite as thoroughly as they might have.

shap