The last couple days have seen a new phenomenon, which may or may not be some sort of sign of the times. Two different papers appearing on the arXiv contain references to blog postings:<\/p>\n
1. In last night’s Cosmological Constant Seesaw in Quantum Cosmology<\/a> by Michael McGuigan, the first two references are to blog postings by Lubos Motl<\/a> and Sean Carroll<\/a>.<\/p>\n 2. A revised version of a paper by Alicki et. al.<\/a> appeared over the weekend. The comment section of the arXiv posting notes that the paper has been revised and expanded in response to comments about it made here<\/a> and here<\/a> at Dave Bacon’s blog The Quantum Pontiff<\/a> (where he has a posting about this entitled Arxiv Links to Pontiff, Science at an End?<\/a>).<\/p>\n Not clear to me what this means. Will it mean the end of science? Will SPIRES add blog entries that are referenced in papers to its database? Will they start counting blog references as well as standard citations, allowing you to search for not just “Topcite” papers, but “Topblog” ones too? Will authors of new papers start regularly getting testy e-mails from blog authors complaining that they haven’t referenced their blog postings? <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The last couple days have seen a new phenomenon, which may or may not be some sort of sign of the times. Two different papers appearing on the arXiv contain references to blog postings: 1. In last night’s Cosmological Constant … Continue reading