About 2 months ago, I uploaded a fairly long paper (P1) to arXiv and it is currently under review.
Now, I am writing a second paper (P2) on a somewhat different topic. But quite unexpectedly, it seems that to justify a single small step in one section of (P2), I will need a result that I proved in (P1). Unfortunately, this result in (P1) needs several lemmas before it can be proved and the proof of it takes up about 5 pages in (P1).
I have two choices:
- Do the small step in (P2) by merely citing the statement of the result from my recently uploaded arXiv paper (P1) : But as I mentioned before, the step for which I need this result is a rather small one. Would it really annoy the referee (eventually when I submit this paper) if he/she is referred to 5 pages in a long paper on arXiv merely to justify a small step?
Ideally, I would have liked to keep the papers disjoint, but it does not seem like I can get rid of this one small step in paper (P2).
- Copy down the entire proof of the required result from (P1), probably in slightly abridged format. But even then, this is likely to add at least 3 pages to the current paper and so it feels unethical (like self plagiarism / salami slicing or something like that).
So what should I do? Are my worries about option 1 (annoying the referee) unfounded? If you were a referee, would you be irritated if I referred you to several pages in a long paper to justify one small step?
Thanks