alt Hacker NewsInteresting idea. How do you distinguish between critical and uncritical citation? It’s also a little thorny—if your related work section is just describing published work (which is a common form of reviewer-proofing), is that a critical or uncritical citation? It seems a little harsh to ding a paper for that.
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wasabi991011 • yesterday at 5:51 PM
"Uncritically" might be the wrong criteria, but you should definitely understand the related work you are citing to a decent extent.
That's one of the issues that causes a bit of work. Citations would need to be judged with context. Let's say paper X is nowadays known to be tainted. If a tainted work is cited just for completeness, it's not an issue, e.g. "the method has been used in [a,b,c,d,x]" If the tainted work is cited critically, even better: e.g. "X claimed to show that..., but y and z could not replicate the results". But if it is just taken for granted at face value, then the taint-label should propagate: e.g. ".. has been previously proved by x and thus our results are very important...".