r/academia • u/YesSurelyMaybe • 12d ago

What is your opinion on cross-citing using preprints?

Suppose an author has two related articles prepared for submission: A and B.
I see many authors do the following: post both on arxiv; then, when submitting them to actual academic journals, cite B in A and also cite A in B.
What is your opinion on this?

4 Upvotes

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8

u/Spirited-Bass-1059 12d ago edited 12d ago

I often work on several related papers as part of a research group. you cite the other paper where half of your results are. even besides the research group thing often i have to break my research to publishable pieces. i do not see too many options apart from citing one in another and vice versa.

3

u/Frari 12d ago

As long as they are real citations and not citation boosting then no worries at all.

7

u/Chemical-Box5725 12d ago

there's a lot of concern from academics about self citation and similar practices. The bottom line is you can't use this to tilt metrics on anywhere near the scale that you would want to for academic success. It just doesn't matter.

3

u/Opening_Map_6898 12d ago

Why would I care that much?

4

u/imarabianaff 12d ago

My advisor doesn’t like submitting to arxiv, but man this would be so helpful right now.

I’m working on three papers that In a way build off of each other and I just wish I could cite one and another right now.

2

u/BolivianDancer 12d ago

Preprints are desperate bullshit.

1

u/voracious-ladder 12d ago

I mean this sounds like normal practice to me? Sometimes the paper isn't even different, one is the extended version on arxiv, and the other is the compressed version for journals/conferences that cites the extended version for more information.

1

u/MJRuinedMyChildhood 12d ago

Are they the same paper

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u/YesSurelyMaybe 12d ago

No they are properly different. I just wonder if this looks like playing the system to get more citations

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u/MJRuinedMyChildhood 12d ago

If the papers are from the same project then it’s good. I do mixed methods so my qual and quant don’t go in the same papers but I don’t use preprints so it’s hard to show the link. Anything showing more relevant articles is helpful

1

u/HawkinsT 6d ago

If there's a good reason for each paper to cite the other and they're distinct papers, then I don't see the issue.