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Limitations

  • GROBID sub-citations: GROBID misclassifies a small fraction of references, particularly sub-citations with letter suffixes like Liu et al., 2024b. These are silently dropped.

  • Ambiguous narrative citations: The supplementation pass skips ambiguous (surname, year) signatures (e.g. two different Zhou 2022 papers in the bibliography). Rare but possible in survey papers.

  • Sentence splitting: pysbd handles most academic abbreviations but can occasionally split mid-sentence. Falling back to --context-window 300 sometimes helps.

  • arXiv rate limits: arXiv enforces ~3 seconds between requests. The first run on a deep trace can take several minutes. Subsequent runs are fast thanks to the local cache.

  • Unavailable papers: Papers not on arXiv, OpenReview, Sci-Hub, S2 open-access, or any supported preprint server appear as red unavailable nodes. Books and some workshop proceedings are typically not retrievable. Use --supply-pdf to provide PDFs manually (local path or URL).

  • Fruchterman-Reingold layout: Implemented via vis.js's forceAtlas2Based solver, which is the closest available approximation. A proper Kamada-Kawai implementation isn't offered because vis.js doesn't ship one.

  • Semantic matching model quality: The default all-mpnet-base-v2 was benchmarked at F1=0.93 on academic citation text. Domain-specific keywords may benefit from threshold tuning. Not available in reverse trace mode.

  • Diff paper_id instability: paper_id is not fully stable across runs. A paper resolved by title hash in one run and by DOI in another may falsely appear as "new" in a diff. Using the same cache directory minimizes this.