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1 year ago in Base Papers By Raghav V
How can I tell if a paper is truly a "base paper" or just a highly cited, trendy paper?
With tools like Google Scholar, I see many papers with high citations. But I'm skeptical—some might be cited for being controversial or part of a hype cycle. What are the markers of a genuine, field-defining base paper?
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By Komal Answered 1 year ago
This is a critical skill. From my experience, genuine base papers have three hallmarks beyond citation count. First, longevity: they are cited consistently over a decade or more, not just a spike. Second, they are featured in textbooks or canonical review articles as the origin of a concept or method. Third, they introduced a foundational theory, methodology, or problem statement that spawned an entire sub-field (e.g., introducing the transformer architecture). Trendy papers are often applications of a base paper's core idea. Check the introduction of later papers; if they consistently frame their work in relation to that paper, you've likely found a true base.
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