To Cite or not to Cite

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This is the Age of 'International Patent Law' and 'Intellectual Property Rights' and stuff.

Much is at stake and we constantly read about legal battles that are raging over our age-old haldi, tulsi, basmati rice and even Tirupati laddu.

During my times, things were more casual by and large because I was told that the Soviet Bloc then didn't sign the Copyright Convention (?).

But there was always this dilemma in Scientific Writing how far should one go citing other people's work. If you are too truthful, it is tough to draw the border line and, as Aniket once said, everyone has to cite Webster since all the words that occur in every Article are to be found there. And Webster himself must have had a hard time citing his earlier lexicographers.

I recall that Einstein's 1905 Paper on Special Relativity has no name anywhere other than his own. Perhaps this was why Whittaker took such umbrage that he handed over all the credit to Poincare. I mean, an unknown young upstart ought to do the proper curtsies to join the Club.

There were several weighty issues:

First, should a predecessor's name be in the Title, or Abstract, or Introduction, or the Body, or Acknowledgments, or References, or even relegated to the Bibliography, or nowhere? Much depended on how BIG he was, and what exactly the fruit expected.

Again, the question of authors: How many should be in the byline and how many in the Acknowledgments, if any? There was a School of Thought to which my Guru SDM squarely belonged which held that the Credit for a Work is divided between its authors; and in decreasing shares along their order of precedence in the byline. There was a more progressive School of Thought which held that the more the merrier; and everyone gets all the Credit (which increases by their number) and the order in the byline should either be alphabetical or by Seniority or even by Juniority, or by lottery. Let me quote Weisskopf's celebrated Vow:

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*".....First of all, it was wonderful to work with Eugene (Wigner) and then there was another thing. This was my first paper of real significance. Of course, I am lucky with my name Weisskopf, to work with somebody after me in the alphabet. So then I made a vow, and said that from now on I will, all through my life, stick to the alphabetical order whenever I publish a paper with somebody else. That was not always easy. For example, when I wrote a book that perhaps some of you remember, namely "Theoretical Nuclear Physics" by Blatt and Weisskopf, the publisher said it must be Weisskopf and Blatt. I told the publisher that I made the vow and I cannot do it. The publisher said "but we must sell the book." Finally, I did convince the John Wiley Company by telling them that if it is Weisskopf and Blatt, the emphasis is on Blatt and not on Weisskopf".....
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Things reached such a pass that I was astounded when I saw an Experimental Paper in High Energy Physics in PRL that had a longer list of Authors (about 140) than the Article itself!

Then again, to cite or not to cite another's name in an 'independent' work if one comes across it in the Printer's Proof Stage. Even a nobody like me, on an absolutely wayside Paper in EJP, had to fight back the weird claims of a truculent Professor in a so-called Ivy League School of the USA who insisted I stole his work. He had to be shut up by pointing out that my Paper is part of a chain of a dozen Papers on the subject in JP(A), PRS, AJP etc over a dozen years, none of which he bothered to cite in his one-off Paper in AJP. I however gracefully offered to share my Nobel Money but not the Fame. Ivy League indeed!

It is never too good to outsource book-writing to one's Research Scholars. I myself was 'employed' officially while an RS at AU @ Rs. 250 p.m. for 2 months to help write what later turned out to be the first draft of a CBSE textbook for High School Students. It was woeful. I didn't know the subject myself thoroughly, never having taught it. And had to do a patchwork. I regret the entire thing and am going to donate that Rs 500 to Charity soon.

Then comes the Ph D Thesis. The 'Introduction' was supposed to make or mar the whole thing. It was received wisdom (thoroughly misplaced) that the Examiner would first turn to the Last Chapter called 'References' to see if his Papers were properly highlighted in bulk; and then in the 'Introduction' and 'Reprints of Papers' if any.

I also discovered that it was always safe to steer things towards Textbook Writers as Ph D Examiners for obvious reasons. The trick never failed.

[Last Laugh: Just as I was closing the File containing the Final Draft of 'Introduction' of my Ph D Thesis, my US-returned friend in Jeans and T-shirt and Pumps barged into my Room in our Faculty Hostel and asked if he could have a look at the thing. He was in the Dairy Sciences (IIT KGP had the richest Bio-Diversity then ).

I asked him to please go ahead. After ten minutes of close reading, he came out with the revealing remark:

"GP: I am sure you are cleverly steering it towards Fourier, or Bessel or Lorentz as one of your Examiners!"]