Item — HN Reader

From dev perspective this highlights that lack of embedded version control and handling of big/security fixes for any academic paper.

Dependencies that are reported to have bugs reported akin to ‘security flaws’, should lead to updates to papers with dependencies.

Naively would be good to sort references into critical references and non-critical references.

2 comments

It would be good if people would universally use any of the extant tools for citation management. It’s not a problem in CS and associated disciplines but in the humanities and social sciences a shockingly large number of researchers don’t use tools like Zotero and Mendeley. They just keep notes and copy/paste entries in a bibliography.

Can you expand how that would help with this problem? In my understanding the tools used to write a paper are completely hidden and non-consequential once a paper is published, no?

I don't know about the others, but Zotero automatically informs me of retractions for articles in my database: https://www.zotero.org/blog/retracted-item-notifications/

So, if a previous article is retracted when I write my own article, I'd probably know.

I blame rent-seeking academic "publishers" for the lack of these features. There are multiple high-impact features to be built in this regard, many of which would take an experienced dev around an afternoon to build, if a proper data source existed.

Instead, the only way to access many papers is as an idiosyncratic PDF, often only including a post-hoc OCR layer, and of course locked behind a 49.99$ 24-hour-access paywall that can also not be automatically accessed, even if you had the required millions laying around.