It's worth pointing out that sometimes, some papers just become part of the general context of things and are no longer explicitly cited. Or people cite textbooks or general survey papers instead.

For example, take a look at Albert Einstein's Google Scholar profile. He's not the top cited physicist. Not even close. It's because other researchers don't explicitly cite his papers. https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=qc6CJjYAAAAJ&hl=en...

Same with Tim Berners-Lee and the World Wide Web. Imagine if his original paper were cited every time someone deployed a web site.

You make it sound like all original ideas from academia must be cited all the time, even if that was not the source of someone’s inspiration.

If I’m in the private sector, and I rediscover something from first principles, it is not my responsibility to go search all academia to see if someone’s done it before so I can cite their work.

If I rely on a code library that doesn’t explicitly cite papers it was built on, it is also not my responsibility to go find all the papers that it might’ve been built from and cite those papers.

Your Paper C does not need to cite Paper A unless you are discussing some aspect of it that Paper B is not. Otherwise you inherit the A citation via B.

Spamming citations is unnecessary.

You should read those papers then

> this is wildly incorrect in an academic context. If I'm using ResNets, I should cite the original ResNet paper, even if I haven't read it.

Eh, I think the correct answer is: read it, then cite it.

You're not really supposed to cite something without reading it, as it might say something different than you think. But sure, citing it w/o reading it is better than not citing it at all.