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Comment by kvcc01 | Hacker News Reader

Seeing Prof. Nash enjoying his walks on campus is one of my fondest memories from grad school. This is very sad.

I was curious to learn more about his work a while ago and had looked up his PhD thesis. Here's a link: http://www.princeton.edu/mudd/news/faq/topics/Non-Cooperativ....

What struck me was that it only had 2 references to prior work! That's how you know you're doing innovative research.

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I'd say that lack of references is more often a sign of ignorance than innovation. I see that every day; transformative work like John Nash's thesis only come along once in a while.

The way we publish research is broken. So much prior art goes unpublished because it is never accepted by a journal. Negative results, meh results, and flawed research all have value. Proper citation is often difficult but can be as important as the work itself, other wise the knowledge graph is fractured.

You're not in academia, are you? There're hundreds of obscure journals and conferences with very low standards. As long as you choose venues that are within your league, you can publish anything that remotely resembles research, and it will show up on Google Scholar. A new academic paper is published every 15 seconds, and most of them are "negative results, meh results, and flawed research".

Very, very few of them are negative results. People just don't write those papers.

Most of them are negative results, though usually not overtly presented as such. In my experience, it's extremely rare for a researcher to throw away months of hard work because the result is null. They almost always find a way to augment it or spin it, write up the paper with the phrase "more research is needed" in the conclusion, and submit to a mediocre venue.

Can you give an example, because I have seen very few papers with negative or 'null' results. I'm not even sure what 'null' results means.

Null means "without value, effect, consequence, or significance; being or amounting to nothing".

Google "reproducibility crisis", "Why Most Published Research Findings Are False" by Ionnadis, "The Garden of Forking Paths" by Gelman.

And one of those was to his own earlier work!

One of the two references was to a previous paper of his.

The other reference was to a book co-authored by John von Neumann. It was written in 1944 but is still in print and can be purchased on Amazon.

If you're going to have only two references, you could do worse than citing those two people.

During my time at Princeton I used to walk around campus all of the time. Unfortunately, I never got to witness that...

It also seems to be all of 30 pages long.

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