alt Hacker NewsKinda gives the whole game away, doesn’t it? “It doesn’t actually matter if the citations are hallucinated.”
In fairness, NeurIPS is just saying out loud what everyone already knows. Most citations in published science are useless junk: it’s either mutual back-scratching to juice h-index, or it’s the embedded and pointless practice of overcitation, like “Human beings need clean water to survive (Franz, 2002)”.
Really, hallucinated citations are just forcing a reckoning which has been overdue for a while now.
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jacquesm • today at 4:01 PM
There should be a way to drop any kind of circular citation ring from the indexes.
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> Most citations in published science are useless junk:
Can't say that matches my experience at all. Once I've found a useful paper on a topic thereafter I primarily navigate the literature by traveling up and down the citation graph. It's extremely effective in practice and it's continued to get easier to do as the digitization of metadata has improved over the years.