Throwaway citation of prior work creates risk of bad HCI research

Marshall, Joe; Linehan, Conor; Spence, Jocelyn; Rennick-Egglestone, Stefan

Abstract

In CHI papers, citation of previous work is typically a shallow, throwaway action that demonstrates little critical engagement with the work cited. We present a citation context analysis of over 3000 citations from 69 papers at CHI2016, which demonstrates that only 4.8% of papers cited are presented as anything other than uncontested fact. In 43% of CHI papers sampled, we found no evidence of any critical engagement. Lack of discussion and critique of previous work can encourage the spread of misunderstandings and errors. Authors, reviewers and publication venues must all change practices to respond to this failure of scholarship.

Citation

Marshall, J., Linehan, C., Spence, J., & Rennick-Egglestone, S. (2017). Throwaway citation of prior work creates risk of bad HCI research.

• Conference Name: CHI 2017: ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
• End Date: May 11, 2017
• Acceptance Date: Feb 10, 2017
• Publication Date: May 6, 2017
• Deposit Date: Mar 9, 2017
• Publicly Available Date: May 6, 2017
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Keywords: Bad HCI, Citation context analysis, Referencing
• Public URL: https://nottingham-repository.worktribe.com/output/859396
• Publisher URL: http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?doid=3027063.3052751
• Related Public URLs: https://chi2017.acm.org/
• Additional Information: Published in: CHI EA '17: proceedings of the 2017 CHI Conference Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems. New York : ACM, 2017, ISBN: 978-1-4503-4656-6. pp. 827-836. doi: 10.1145/3027063.3052751
• Contract Date: Mar 9, 2017