Comment by plastic041 5 days ago
The video shows a user asking Prism to find articles to cite and to put them in a bib file. But what's the point of citing papers that aren't referenced in the paper you're actually writing? Can you do that?
Edit: You can add papers that are not cited, to bibliography. Video is about bibliography and I was thinking about cited works.
> a bibliography (a list of relevant works but not necessarily cited)
Didn't know that there's difference between bibliography and cited work. thank you.
I once took a philosophy class where an essay assignment had a minimum citation count.
Obviously ridiculous, since a philosophical argument should follow a chain of reasoning starting at stated axioms. Citing a paper to defend your position is just an appeal to authority (a fallacy that they teach you about in the same class).
The citation requirement allowed the class to fulfill a curricular requirement that students needed to graduate, and therefore made the class more popular.
In coursework, references are often a way of demonstrating the reading one did on a topic before committing to a course of argumentation. They also contextualize what exactly the student's thinking is in dialogue with, since general familiarity with a topic can't be assumed in introductory coursework. Citation minimums are usually imposed as a means of encouraging a student to read more about a topic before synthesizing their thoughts, and as a means of demonstrating that work to a professor. While there may have been administrative reasons for the citation minimum, the concept behind them is not unfounded, though they are probably not the most effective way of achieving that goal.
While similar, the function is fundamentally different from citations appearing in research. However, even professionally, it is well beyond rare for a philosophical work, even for professional philosophers, to be written truly ex nihilo as you seem to be suggesting. Citation is an essential component of research dialogue and cannot be elided.
> Citing a paper to defend your position is just an appeal to authority
Hmm, I guess I read this as a requirement to find enough supportive evidence to establish your argument as novel (or at least supported in 'established' logic).
An appeal to authority explicitly has no reasoning associated with it; is your argument that one should be able to quote a blog as well as a journal article?
> Citing a paper to defend your position is just an appeal to authority (a fallacy that they teach you about in the same class).
an appeal to authority is fallacious when the authority is unqualified for the subject at hand. Citing a paper from a philosopher to support a point isn't fallacious, but "<philosophical statement> because my biology professor said so" is.
A common approach to research is to do literature review first, and build up a library of citable material. Then when writing your article, you summarize the relevant past research and put in appropriate citations.
To clarify, there is a difference between a bibliography (a list of relevant works but not necessarily cited), and cited work (a direct reference in an article to relevant work). But most people start with a bibliography (the superset of relevant work) to make their citations.
Most academics who have been doing research for a long time maintain an ongoing bibliography of work in their field. Some people do it as a giant .bib file, some use software products like Zotero, Mendeley, etc. A few absolute psychos keep track of their bibliography in MS Word references (tbh people in some fields do this because .docx is the accepted submission format for their journals, not because they are crazy).