Ask HN: Why don't news articles cite academic sources clearly?

2 points by Jonnax 8y ago ↗ HN

I've noticed this over the years especially with science reporting. The news site will report on a study with quotes from both the paper as well the author.

But nowhere on the page is an easy link to it or even just the title of the paper with author names.

For example:

http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/news/facebook-artificial-intelligence-ai-chatbot-new-language-research-openai-google-a7869706.html

They even say: "(That paper was published more than a month ago but began to pick up interest this week.)"

In trying to find the paper I googled parts of the info. But my journey went from that article to a random webpage called Inc: https://www.inc.com/thomas-koulopoulos/facebook-may-have-just-shown-what-elon-musk-bill-g.html

They ran with the story and corrected it based on this post:

https://www.facebook.com/dhruv.batra.dbatra/posts/1943791229195215%20

That took me to the blog post at code.facebook.com that should have at least been the linked source: https://code.facebook.com/posts/1686672014972296/deal-or-no-deal-training-ai-bots-to-negotiate/

That finally takes me to the paper:

https://arxiv.org/abs/1706.05125

So I don't really see the need for this unless the news article authors are afraid of being refuted or it's some click bait issue.

On another note it's crazy how many websites seem to rewrite the same basic article over and over again.