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gBoostedMachinations t1_j0tw8pt wrote

Reply to comment by dinkboz in [D] Will there be a replacement for Machine Learning Twitter? by MrAcurite

What’s wrong with citing preprints?

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czar_el t1_j0uu183 wrote

"What's wrong with flying in a plane before it's passed inspection?"

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Hyper1on t1_j0wrenm wrote

Obviously very different situations, since plane inspections are actually reliable. These days I don't view a preprint as any different to a NeurIPS paper, since if I read the preprint and think it's good then essentially the only difference is that one has passed the NeurIPS reviewer lottery. I advise all ML researchers to just trust themselves, read the preprint, and if they think it's valuable then feel free to cite it.

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dinkboz t1_j0xr6xg wrote

Im just knocking on ML researchers for citing preprints all the time lol. This is very much frowned upon in mechanical engineering (I apply ML to mechE problems), so Im just giving you guys a hard time for doing things differently. In most of the cases, I don’t think it’s a big issue.

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Mukigachar t1_j0u1if2 wrote

Preprints may not have passed peer review yet, meaning there's potential for their findings to be invalid

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hattulanHuumeparoni t1_j0yb16m wrote

At that point you're just citing a blog post with the aesthetics of a research article. No peer review, no editor to push back. Mind you, these things don't necessarily make the paper good, but they are useful sanity checks.

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gBoostedMachinations t1_j102w53 wrote

Sure but I have never had any problem separating the wheat from the chaff. I can read them myself and decide whether the work is done well. Often the authors can be vetted as well.

If a reader of my own paper has a problem with me citing preprints they can read the paper themselves and decide if it’s appropriate. But the fact that it’s a preprint itself doesn’t really matter.

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hattulanHuumeparoni t1_j109pxc wrote

Uhh I don't think anyone is gonna read through all your citations just to check if they're legit or not...

EDIT: so why not just bite the bullet and move to blog posts instead of preprints?

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