I found some papers somewhat related to my work, and, on Google Scholar, the citations are for the arXiv preprint, not a journal version of the paper. Why is this? The citations are in the thousands, and the professors are pretty well-known.


I may throw some insights in the fields related to computer science and machine learning. Nowadays those fields witness an explosion of advancement: numerous international conferences and workshops are hold every month. With such a rapid speed of development, it is a common practice that the authors upload their preprints to arXiv even before their work is accepted, just to establish their progress.

  • Right, indeed my question is specific to this area. However, the papers I have in mind, with thousands of citations, are now nearly 5 years old, and they are still in preprint status? – user117396 Dec 15 '19 at 7:04
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    I am not 100% sure, but I guess it could be for the following reasons: 1) with so many citations and hence some fame, it is not necessary to submit it to a conference to get publicity. Moreover, there is no novelty at all as a submission. 2) what is possibly more favourable is to submit a journal version, but the authors may be busy or don't care about it or do not have more results to make a journal version. This is in particular more likely for big names. – R. Ding Dec 15 '19 at 7:10
  • RDing : I think its more of knowledge sharing, rather than the word "establish". – Rajesh D Dec 15 '19 at 7:18
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    Are the papers actually still in preprint status, or is Google Scholar merely linking to the arXiv version as one of many available? – JeffE Dec 15 '19 at 14:52
  • Rajesh Dachiraju: You are definitely right. I was trying to argue that in some rapid developing areas, it is common that similar research takes place simultaneously. Those who have got some results would like to be the first to publicize their results. That is what I meant by 'establish'. – R. Ding Dec 19 '19 at 7:57

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