probably not as 1) most academics are just as familiar with extra-legal ways to access papers and 2) there's likely a few specific papers you need to cite, maybe from your PI, or a partner lab, or other person pretty close to your network who is working on the same type of stuff and you're building on it
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I have seen a recent trend in my field of people citing recent papers for things that were literally known in the 1800s. However this is probably due to fraudulent citation rings and relationships, so I'm not sure if it contributes to my point.
In one particularly embarrassing example, in 1994, a diabetes care journal published an article which described a novel method for estimating the total area under a metabolic curve:
https://care.diabetesjournals.org/content/17/2/152
(PDF: https://math.berkeley.edu/~ehallman/math1B/TaisMethod.pdf)
It wasn't until some months later that a response pointed out that the author had rediscovered the trapezoidal method, which was known to Newton and is typically covered in precalculus courses.
This....doesn't seem crazy to me? Somebody might have known it in the 1800s, but any given modern reader may not.
You could cite the original source, but it might be inaccessible (and possibly not very complete). A modern article could be easier for the reader, especially if it's a review. Sometimes you might just want a few examples of a phenomenon too, so the choice doesn't matter much.
No, I'm talking about when the fact was fully understood and widely known in the 1800s.
This is google scholar optimization 101. I doubt it can be considered "fraudulent" at this point.
That's what I do. If I want to say something obvious, I Google for the first citation which says that thing in a way which is readable, understandable, and correct.
Honestly, the problem isn't with whom I cite, so much as:
1) Academia deciding to use metrics inappropriately (as well as expecting citations on well-known obvious things). I'm not going to adjust my work style because academics decided to adopt dumb metrics and build massive, dumb incentive structures around those metrics.
2) Reviewers expecting citations for everything, and not caring about quality of those citations. "The sky is blue" doesn't work. "The sky is blue (Blitzerman, Tinkledorf 2012)" works fine, even if Blitzerman, Tinkledorf 2012 is complete nonsense.
No, you got that wrong. The way you do it is:
"As previous research indicates, the sky is blue ([1], [2], [3], [4], [5], [6], [7], [8], [9])."
Of course you haven't actually looked at all those 9 sources, except maybe the abstract of the first three.
Actually, it's not the academics who have adopted (or pushed) these metrics. They essentially came with the general trend of trying to make everything measurable (usually pushed by MBAs).
Also:
It's difficult to know whether a publication is open or closed when you download it from a research institute or a university (access is automatically granted based on the ip address).
You only realize how much it cost when you try to download it from home.