Should You Read What You Cite? That Depends

When arXiv announced it would ban people for hallucinated citations, that is citations of papers that don’t exist, the discussion online got sidetracked by the question of whether academics actually read the papers they cite. Some people proudly insisted that any good scholar always reads every paper they reference, others argued that was ridiculous. As always, the answer is never that simple. In certain fields, it is enormously important to read the papers you cite if you want to do solid, careful, scholarly work. In others, it’s entirely irrelevant. It mostly comes down to what citations are for. And luckily, I’ve already written a post about that. So let’s go through the citation motivations I mention in that post. First, some citations are about respecting priority, feeding the system by which academics get credit for having an idea first. The incentive system of academia depends on getting this more or less right, but that doesn’t mean every academic has to check things at every…