Citing into the future on ArXiv – good or bad idea? I have coauthored two papers, which are strongly related. The younger paper is thus citing the first and the older paper is annoucing the second along the lines of “a study of aspect X will be published elsewhere“. As ArXiv enables you to update your papers, it would be possible to include a citation to the new paper in the old paper after the aforementioned sentence. This might save a reader of the old paper some time with finding the new paper.

However, this breaks some paradigms that were inherently fulfilled by any pre-internet citation, i.e., that you could not cite future work¹ and that there are no loops in citation graphs (i.e., there can be no papers A₁, …, such that A₁ cites A₂, which cites A₃, which cites …, which cites A₁). Thus I find it conceivable that such a citation into the future may cause some problems, for example some weird software behavior (ignoring for the example’s sake that this would arguably be the software’s fault).

Is there any such issue, which would make the aforementioned citation into the future a problem?




¹ Of course, will be published elswhere existed before, but it could not be accompanied by a regular citation.
Occasionally two related articles are published simultaneously and cite each other, so loops in the citation graph are OK. See for example this article in The Scientist which describes two papers which do so. I was able to verify that they both cite each other through my university's library.