Hacker News Reader

Comment by jessriedel | Hacker News Reader

> Instead they put a link to a webpage in a footnote, which does nothing for assigning credit.

Why would a footnote be considered less credit than something in the list of references? It's pretty common in my field to use footnotes to give credit to other researchers for ideas that arose in an informal context, e.g., "I thank A. Zee for pointing this out". Indeed, the question of whether prose footnotes are at the bottom of the page rather than displayed intermixed with citations to published sources (as in Physical Review Letters) is just a stylistic choices that varies by journal.

Obviously unpublished sources can't easily be counted into automated citation tracking systems for technical reasons, but if the author wanted that they could publish something (or, e.g., put it in a free repository like the arXiv).

View on HN

Crediting a web page in a footnote is almost no credit at all. The web page didn't compile the data. A person did. Sometimes the person is inconveniently pseudonymous, but other times they should be credited by name.

I added the Google Books Ngrams example slightly later, but: People _do_ publish papers about their data, and their citation counts are often extremely low, because research users continue to use footnotes instead.

Are you talking about someone crediting a webpage without attempting to attach the name of the author? I have never seen this in academic research, ever. Can you link to an example?

In the OP case, the 4chan author was anonymous.

EDIT:

> People _do_ publish papers about their data, and their citation counts are often extremely low, because research users continue to use footnotes instead.

Are you talking about researchers not giving credit for pure data sets? That is a really very different topic.

> Are you talking about someone crediting a webpage without attempting to attach the name of the author? I have never seen this in academic research, ever. Can you link to an example?

Let's continue with the Google Ngrams example. All I had to do was search Google Scholar for "Google Ngrams" to find easy examples on the first page of results, like this one: http://www.aclweb.org/anthology/W14-1611

The paper is written by famous Stanford researchers, and they do not cite a single author of their data. Just URLs in footnotes.

This also happens to my research (ConceptNet) all the time. The fact that you haven't noticed it doesn't mean I'm making it up.

I don't see why you think researchers not giving credit for data is a different topic from what I brought up. What I said was, researchers in my field are in the habit of not giving credit for data, and instead they have adopted the convention of using half-assed footnotes with URLs in them, which is not appropriate credit. I speculate that one reason for this habit is that data often comes from inconveniently non-academic sources and would look bad in the bibliography. The habit is so pervasive that authors remain in the habit even when a paper exists.

It's a different topic because the OP dispute (whether to give credit to data generation/creation as comprehensively as to data analysis) is logically distinct from the OP dispute (whether to give different amounts credit to the same sort of contribution based on where/whether it was formally published). The fact that the people you criticize continue to not properly give credit even when a formal publication exists demonstrates this starkly.

For what it's worth, I agree with your criticism.

If the persons who compiled a data set (or made a latex package or or or) published a paper on that thing, by all means, cite it.

If they didn't, but they do have a web page on the thing, then give them credits in the currency of the web: links.

GP has a point: if the creators want scientific credit, they can easily get that via ArXiv (or, of course, a peer-reviewed publication). If not: increase their PageRank.

> It's pretty common in my field to use footnotes to give credit to other researchers for ideas that arose in an informal context, e.g., "I thank A. Zee for pointing this out".

Is your field Quantum Field Theory?

https://www.kitp.ucsb.edu/zee/

No, quantum information, but I always thought Tony Zee had the best whimsical name to use as an example in these situations :)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com