We often remark that there exist too much citations within each paper or revue or Ph.D manuscripts ? The question here, are all the researches read and understand each one cited in their works ? Or, they are a minority (or majority ) of researches copy and paste the citations from another works ?
Good researchers will definitely understand the cited paper; others might not, particular those who are more interested in number of papers that their scientific quality !!!
Hi Adam,
This really varies. If I am doing a systematic review, for instance, all the papers included in my systematic review must be thoroughly read to represent the ideas and findings of the authors appropriately. When using it for a literature review, the one must understand the argument(s) of the author(s) to be able to build on their arguments in your own work. So I am inclined to say yes they are well read. However, there are others who do not apply enough time and effort to read through the argument but might obtain an important definition, for example, to use in their work.
Good researchers will definitely understand the cited paper; others might not, particular those who are more interested in number of papers that their scientific quality !!!
Can I hijack this thread a bit and ask if having a large number of citations has become a norm (and therefore perpetuated by young scientists), or should we start focusing on a small number of valuable texts and reduce our reference list?
Dear @Nicholas Conrad Galuszynski , i think that when you take some Ph.D manuscripts or articles and you remark that the number of citations is kind of small, you apprecitate that work, no ?
It's better to select the more cited papers in the state of art because these papers are considered as references in every fields. Indeed, they provide every researcher very detailed and described approaches , which may help them in their works.
Number of citations can be more but all of them should be relevant.
To cite a paper means you have read its contents thoroughly and understands all its intricacies. As such, the researcher can succinctly cite a portion of the read material, confident that it could be relevant in supporting his/her arguments whether in a systematic review or literature survey.
Unfortunately, some scholars needlessly cite a paper when they just read its abstract or just the introductory section of the paper. Worst, ohers just lazily pick and cite them from other papers and treat them as if they had fully digested the content of the paper. This is not scholarly and defeats the core foundations of a good research which are INTEGRITY and EXCELLENCE.
Thanks.
Dickson Adom
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