Comment by michaelt | Hacker News Reader

Comment by michaelt | Hacker News Reader

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Academic papers often include an introduction which summarises the context in which the paper is written. Consider https://arxiv.org/pdf/2201.03545v2.pdf where the paper says "For many decades, this has been the default use of ConvNets, generally on limited object categories such as digits [43], faces [58, 76] and pedestrians [19, 63]. Entering the 2010s, the region-based detectors [23, 24, 27, 57] further elevated ConvNets to the position of being the fundamental building block in a visual recognition system."

This shows the authors are familiar with the field, avoids inadvertent plagiarism, allows them to make it clear precisely how their contribution contributes to knowledge, shows people from funding bodies that this is a cutting edge and important field of research, and points readers in the right direction if they want to see earlier ideas, or ideas in a more applied context.

If among those 92 citations should be a few papers from your boss and your colleagues, nobody will see that as unusual - as long as they're at least marginally relevant.

This is a lot less true in mathematics research, where a question existing and not being trivial is enough motivation to investigate.

I would in fact argue that the trend, in "applied" fields, of justifying the importance of a piece of work by pointing out that a lot of people are doing similar work is in fact self-fulfilling. That makes it somewhat useless as a measure of importance.

Scientific context should be critical, not just descriptive.

> I would in fact argue that the trend, in "applied" fields, of justifying the importance of a piece of work by pointing out that a lot of people are doing similar work is in fact self-fulfilling.

There is one filter on this, though: you have to get funding for the work, which is a different process than getting a paper accepted. There is of course some overlap, as "people are working on this so it must be important" can be useful in arguing for funding, but funders at least potentially have other criteria in play too.

You would argue for the importance of research verbally, or in some kind of proposal document, though. There's no need to include part of that document in the final publication.

Your claim about applied fields is not correct. When you do your research, you survey what other people have done in some subarea. You determine what has not been done. And then you do it.

When you write your paper you say exactly this in the introductory context. Here is what other people have done, here is a problem not yet solved in this area, we solve it. It saves the reader an enormous amount of time by not having to do a literature review themselves to see how the paper fits into the larger thrust of the field, and what the novelty is.

How can you justify the novelty other than by comparing to other people's work?

Sorry, just saw this.

Which claim do you disagree with? The claim that the trend I describe exists, or the fact that it is bad?

Note that what you describe is what I advocate: you explain that the question exists and hasn't been answered. This is not an argument that is based on the volume of work that exists.

It is also an argument you cannot (as an author) be trusted to make. Even if you cite everything that has been published that is tangentially related to your claimed contribution, there is no way a reviewer will know all of it, and no way a reviewer will be able to go and read all of it. So they can't determine whether your claim of novelty is correct unless they already know the entire field. The only defense against this is to encourage crisp and clear descriptions of claimed contributions (to knowledge or practice) and violently reject any overinflated claims. It is not to include an entire survey paper in the introduction of every piece of work that pushes the state of the art forward.

It does mean that the average paper is less accessible to the non-expert. It also encourages the regular publication of surveys whose role is solely to critically and exhaustively compare recent advances, and of textbooks whose role is to describe historic developments and their context. This is not something every paper should be doing.

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