Hot take: we would all do well to lose the practice of “defensive citation” — citing excessively so that no reviewer can claim you are ignorant of the literature when you fail to cite them.

I am reading a primary research paper, not a review, and it’s got 50 citations in the first two paragraphs. There’s no need for this. I blame Goodhart’s law.

I appreciate that a number of you pushed back on this post to ask why this sort of citation practice is a bad thing.

I had a dozen answers on the tip of my tongue, but none of them felt so compelling that it would force an imagined interlocutor to come up short and immediately concede my point.

So it was good to take the time to think about why I dislike this so much.

My answer—and perhaps it's a bit of an old man yelling at a cloud stance—is that I don't see this as a purpose of citation.

A lot of it has to do with process.

As I see it, the purpose of citation is most definitely *not* to signal in-group status by illustrating a knowledge of the perhaps insider norms of what material has to be cited in what order with what descriptors.

And the purpose of peer review should not be to gatekeep in this way, let alone to generate citations for the reviewer's CV.

I tend to think that the purpose is to record the substantive intellectual influences on a given piece of work.