Do I really have to cite an arXiv paper?

What I'm saying here is that the "academic code of conduct" is a bit outdated.

I couldn't resist writing that so I read the article looking for something substantive to include as a sop to my conscience.

He didn't contextualize or establish the existence of the problem to my satisfaction. A naive reader would assume that he is that he is arguing against academics who feel literally entitled to plagiarize pre-print publications. I don't buy it. I suspect that the actual debate he's engaged in involves is better characterized by the following three quotes:

"…many authors are peeved, pricked, piqued, and provoked by requests from reviewers that they cite papers which are only published on the arXiv preprint"

"Any time that our work follows … ideas from other people, and when we can reasonably be expected to be aware of this, we ought to cite the related work."

"If similar work comes to our attention during a proper literature review, we ought to cite it."

To which the counter-argument would the following, in his closing passage:

"Many reviewers are abusing the system and asking for ridiculous comparison to recently-posted preprint papers…"

This acknowledgement comes too late to be given any useful answer, even though one can easily see it to be the core of a real problem; the reviewers, after all, are serving as gatekeepers to publication, and if one should not put "too much faith in … the overworked cohort of peer reviewers, roughly 30% of whom typically fail to even comprehend the basic outline of the paper," then it is probably extremely frustrating when someone insists that you cite papers that you haven't read in your bibliography as 'related literature', let alone papers you have read and dismissed as insufficiently important to refer your reader to, let alone papers that were clearly written by the reviewer's pet pony in crayon on a stable wall before being photographed and uploaded to the arXiv as uncompressed IMG files.

I think no matter the source, you (as the author) have the final responsibility of citing correct work. You can (reasonably) choose to only cite nature because it is "safer" choice, but you can also cite other sources though you should of course take care to vet that source well yourself. As you point out, a lot of shit makes it into journals and in fact many journals are themselves shit (and outright frauds) so adding arxiv as a source doesn't really fundamentally change anything.

As a side note, I believe that many papers cite way _too_ many papers. Unless you use or expand upon a paper's work, I think you shouldn't be citing it (except possibly as general background knowledge). I just can't understand how you can write a paper that's explicitly doing so with 100 previous works (a book sure, but not a paper). Then again, my citation philosophy goes against many others (including my former advisor). Many think you should cite basically anything tangentially related (especially the works of the academic king makers). For me this is no longer important since I no longer am an academic researcher. I have the freedom to pontificate on the subject without any worries of having a career. :)

In fact, I personally lean towards often including arguments even if they can be found in sources you cite. If you can provide a much clearer argument than the source (and it doesn't detract from your own work), you should include the improved one in your work. If it is a minor detail that is both worth citing as well as easy to include, then I think you should include it to avoid requiring the reader to hop around from paper to paper to get an understanding of your work. You should make your work as accessible to the reader as possible.

If I'm writing writing a paper about my ideas, it would be unethical to "make my friend a co-author" if my friend didn't contribute to those ideas.

Yes, it would be strongly preferable to tell readers where they can find the info you are citing. But if that info is unpublished, then that's life.

As a side note, why do you believe that it doesn't apply outside those industries? I'm sure if you asked Brin and Page, they would say they were inspired by (the limitations of) previous search engines. Ditto for Stripe and Paypal and Facebook and Myspace.

Academic ideas are (hopefully) much more specialized than these broad ideas. In business they are more comparable to patents and for patents prior art is of course extremely important (enough so to legally invalidate your legal claim to your idea!). In contrast to patents, however, there aren't strong legal mechanisms to enforce priority of ideas and that's why being honest and open about it (community policing of these ideals) are especially important. If academics were to entirely stop caring about citing their sources, academic research would probably totally cease to function.

https://arxiv.org/abs/math/0303109

https://arxiv.org/abs/math/0307245

There is a fair amount of evidence that this isn't true. In general, most statistics in scientific research aren't done by statisticians, and there are whole classes of methodological errors that are regularly not caught because the "peers" have the same lack of statistical education as the people whose papers they are reviewing.

I see that as all true, but irrelevant in this context. If you source material from a pre-print on arXiv, then you should cite it. Seems totally obvious to me. Of course you would prefer the final, published paper if it's available. But that wasn't the question at hand.

And even with all that said... I would argue that in some fields, (cs / ml / etc.) we're getting close to a point where arXiv itself is become almost a parallel publishing mechanism where people cite/publish completely within the arXiv realm, with less regard for "traditional" journals and what-not in general. Especially when you factor in papers from researchers who come from industry, as opposed to academia, and care less about some of the normal trappings of academic publishing.

I adore arXiv but still believe it's a preprint.

Of course it's a pre-print. I didn't contend otherwise. I'm just saying that, from my perspective, it's obvious that you should cite a pre-print if it's relevant.

I will allow though, that norms probably vary from field to field, and as a non-academic, my take is likely different from, say, somebody who is deeply immersed in academia, pursuing tenure, etc.

It doesn't say that though, it just says that you shouldn't have to cite nonsense on arXiv. This implies that you can read a paper, implement something similar, and afterwards decide that the paper was nonsense, didn't influence your work, and shouldn't be cited.

If it doesn't relate to your work, or you haven't read it, then obviously it needn't be cited.

I'm in agreement that ideas are a dime a dozen. Sure, it's necessary to cite the first known mention of an idea, and there are situations where the first mention of an idea is important such as in the patent system.

"Planting" happens in my world all the time. Unfortunately, managers give a lot more importance to "ideas" than they are really worth, because they over-value their own interventions in general. Somebody will blurt out an idea in a meeting, wait until someone else has developed it, and then rush in to take credit. If a manager does this, it's a blow to morale. I have my own rule of thumb, which is "show your work" from math class. Just writing down the answer doesn't get you full credit.

A couple of historical examples: The ancient Greeks are credited with the atomic theory, but they had no concept of even turning it into a serious hypothesis. Lots of ideas are anticipated in science fiction, but do those authors really deserve credit?