When arXiv announced it would ban people for hallucinated citations, that is citations of papers that don’t exist, the discussion online got sidetracked by the question of whether academics actually read the papers they cite. Some people proudly insisted that any good scholar always reads every paper they reference, others argued that was ridiculous.

As always, the answer is never that simple. In certain fields, it is enormously important to read the papers you cite if you want to do solid, careful, scholarly work. In others, it’s entirely irrelevant.

It mostly comes down to what citations are for. And luckily, I’ve already written a post about that.

So let’s go through the citation motivations I mention in that post.

First, some citations are about respecting priority, feeding the system by which academics get credit for having an idea first. The incentive system of academia depends on getting this more or less right, but that doesn’t mean every academic has to check things at every step of the way. Besides, if you get this wrong, you’ll find out quickly. Submit a paper to a preprint server like arXiv, and you’ll be sure to get emails telling you that some obscure Soviet researcher figured it all out first.

Other citations are about substantiating claims. These are the most important to get right. Here, you really ought to have read, if not the whole paper, at least the full justification for the claim you’re making. You can have some leeway if the methods are unfamiliar enough, for example a complicated experiment you can’t understand all the details of. Science and technology do require some trust. But you should have at least a sense of where things could go wrong, and why.

Citations to provide context are a different beast. Here, you’re trying to tell a reader where your ideas come from. You can’t show them the conversations you have with your colleagues, the things they value and get you excited about. So you have to show them papers instead. But the papers aren’t the thing you read, they’re just a convenient proxy.

Finally, citations do sometimes just exist to follow social conventions. And yeah, you don’t have to read these, just like you don’t have to say how you’re doing when someone asks you how you’re doing. They’re the academic equivalent of social white lies, and should be taken roughly as seriously, both by their supporters and detractors.

In the US, funding agencies seem to be increasingly opposed to an often inevitable feature of good science: international collaboration. Scientists have been told by officials at the National Institutes of Health that they need to remove mention of foreign collaborators from progress reports, or that they need to avoid such collaborations to begin with. At NASA, officials have told scientists that rather than just avoiding funding work in China, they should actively avoid collaborating with Chinese researchers. And a recently introduced bill would make that restriction more explicit.

I have a general policy against discussing concrete political issues on this blog, so I’m not going to dig into the details of who’s doing what here, how far it’s going or how novel it is. That policy extends to the comments. If you mention specific laws, politicians, or political parties, I will delete your comment.

I do want to say something more general, though. I think people often underestimate just how important international collaboration is.

I’ve talked before about how scientific specialization spreads scientists around the world. Scientists want to work with people who work on their specific interests, and there are often only a few people that fit that description. So people move across the world, creating centers of expertise.

More than that, though, essentially any activity, done well, is done internationally. The better you want to perform, the more likely it is that the best collaborator will be someone in another country.

People don’t notice this as much as they could, because they’re used to the exceptions. Popular art is often siloed by language and cultural references. Sports are intentionally set up as competitions between regions and nations, and militaries compete as a practical necessity. But without those exceptions, international competition wins out. The best doctor, the best classical musician, and the best businessperson for a job can’t be expected to come from one country or another. Those fields, like science, are international.

When that internationalism is weak, it’s a warning sign. Without that drive to succeed on an international stage, scientists get lazy. There are countries with a history of academic cronyism, where universities were run more on interpersonal politics than scholarly merit, cozy fiefdoms where prominent academics dole out positions. To combat this, policymakers work to make their research systems more international. They explicitly ask about international collaborations and participation in international conferences in grant applications, not to discourage them, but to encourage them: to reward academics who show merit on the international stage and break up lazy patronage networks.

It worries me that it sounds like some US policymakers want to do the opposite. People are increasingly worried about bias and groupthink in the sciences, and increasingly mad that scientists could be wasting the public’s money to maintain a cushy lifestyle. International collaboration is how you hold scientists to account, how you force them to compete and show their merit. If you drop that, academia is going to get a whole lot worse.