Writing an academic paper contains of subtasks. For the preparation, the author has to create a bibliography first, that are books and papers from Google Scholar which he finds useful. What the author also needs are short notes about topics. From that input he can create the fulltext paper. The best language for doing that is english and the Lyx software is very well suited in writing the text. The bibliography file is stored in the bibtex format, and the notes are written in a separate Lyx section. The ready pdf paper gets uploaded to an online repository. Other researchers can search and read the file.
The overall research cycle is painted in the figure. I've used the diagram tool “dia” for making the arrows looking nice. It seems first a bit complicated but it makes sense for acting in this way. Usually a research cycle starts with a query to the Google Scholar website. The researcher asking for information about a certain topic. He finds some papers, and makes some notes. It is not necessary, to copy&paste every interesting looking paper in the bibtex-file. In case of doubt the own bibtex file should be as small as possible. That means, not citing anybody is the default behavior.
If the researcher has written some fulltext he will notice after a while, which literature he must cite in any case. He will recognize, that a single paper is so important, that there is no way to leave it uncited. Then he can pick up the bibtex entry from Google Scholar and put it in his bibtex file. But again, in case of doubt: please resist. Citing a lot of papers is no sign of academic depth, it is a sign, that the author is an beginner who haven't understand anything.
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