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Comment by nonbel | Hacker News Reader

>"As someone who reads a lot of scientific papers, I can't think of a single one whose correctness is actually dependent on the correctness of the results of a paper it cites"

What field are you reading where each paper is independent of all the others? As the most obvious example, in biomed pretty much every paper says something like "as done previously[ref x, y]" in the methods section. It is an extremely annoying, but very common, practice (usually refs x and y contain somewhat different methods descriptions and/or also contain the "as done previously" phrase). There are many other ways the papers depend on each other too ("we used these cells because they don't express this protein[ref z]", etc)

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I more or less exclusively read CS papers, which sometimes contain similar statements. I don't see how in your example, "ref x" being invalid would make the paper citing it invalid. Can you give an actual example of a paper that does this that could be invalidated in this way?

Basically, to me, an empirical result arrived at using the scientific method is, well, an empirical result arrived at using the scientific method. And it seems to me that the only thing that would invalidate such a result is if it were found that the researchers did not follow the protocol they described in their paper. The fact that the researchers might have merely cited another paper, or used the method described in another paper, in which the researchers were found to have "cheated" in this way, doesn't seem to invalidate the paper in question. It's possible that the researchers in question could have happened to also cheat, but I don't see any reason to assume it's any more likely because it happened with a paper they cited (unless of course they're the same researchers building on their own previous work).

For the methods citation example, the citation chain (is supposed to) go all the way back to the paper devoted to originally describing the method. In that paper there (is supposed to be) a bunch of checks (compare to other methods, etc) that the method is working as claimed. These checks will not be repeated every time.

    > > whose correctness is actually
    > > dependent on the correctness of the
    > > results of *a* paper it cites

    > where each paper is independent of
    > *all* the others

These are not describing the same thing

If I understand, the author is suggesting something like pagerank for axiomatic correctness where a paper's score can be interpreted per paper (in terms of some binary promise of "correctness") even if the score is computed by the weighted correctness of the papers it represents.

Really, the information should be abstracted away from the paper, a la freebase or wikidata, and there should be strict rules (e.g. the protocols stackoverflow enforces) such that no cycles can occur, such that propositions can be resolved to axioms, and such that it is practical to compute scores in a finite period of time with reasonable resource constraints...

See also gitxiv.org (at attempt at literate research for computer science and physics papers that can be paired with code). It doesn't address the problem described, but if statements of a paper are codified (e.g. curry howard isomorphism) in a strict way, it makes it easier for "linked statements" to have a quantifiable value.

I think they are, unless you are selectively citing (irrelevant) papers to avoid depending on any...

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