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Comment by arp242 | Hacker News Reader

The question is how many of the citations are actually in support? As in: some might be citations in the form of "Donald Duck's research on coin polishing[1] is not considered due to the controversial nature". Or even "examples of controversial papers on coin polishing include the work of Donald Duck[1]".

I don't think "number of citations" typically make this distinction?

Also for some papers the citation doesn't really matter, and you can exclude the entire thing without really affecting the paper.

Regardless, this seems like a nice idea on the face of it, but practically I foresee a lot of potential problems if done "non-negotiably".

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I love the idea. It would also dampen the tendency to over-cite, and disincentivize citation rings. But mainly encourage researchers to actually evaluate the papers they're citing instead of just cherry picking whatever random crap they can find to support their idea.

Maybe negative citations could be categorized separately by the authors and not count towards the cited paper's citation count and be ignored for cascading citations.

If the citation doesn't materially affect the paper, the author can re-publish it with that removed.

> If the citation doesn't materially affect the paper, the author can re-publish it with that removed.

This paper is 22 years old. Some authors have retired. Some are dead.

I really think that at the very least it needs a quick sniff test. Which is boring uninteresting work and with 4,500 citations that will take some effort, but that's why we pay the journals big bucks. Otherwise it's just going to be the academic variant of the Scunthorpe problem.

And/or do something more fine-grained than a binary retraction, such as adding in a clear warning that a citation was retracted and telling readers to double-check that citation specifically.

If you are cherry-picking cites that agree with you, that is a much bigger scandal than you citing a paper that ended up being retracted 22 years later. The point of citations is to cite the relevant literature, pro and con.

I guess those kind of citations should be put in different category that doesn't increase citation count of the referenced paper, in other words raising its prestige. These kind of citations shouldn't do that anyway.

So now if you want to cite come paper you have to decide which papers you'd die and live with, and consequently your paper prestige will be dependent on how many other papers want to die and live with yours.

I guess you can have something like a nofollow attribute

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nofollow

although the incentives will be more confusing.

There's an argument to be made that citing something to disagree with it should increase its prestige but not its credibility (to the extent that those can be separated): you're agreeing that it's important.

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