Credit is very important — especially in today’s world of instantaneous mass communications, where people can rapidly, repeatedly, and freely lift, share, use, alter, and sometimes even claim credit for, the work of original innovators. We all want our work to be shared and used, but without credit, we can lose what is rightfully ours. For those of us whose work has taken years or decades to develop, the consequences are very bad indeed. There is no “merely” about this.
Consider Dunleavy’s final words, where he writes about the critical importance of open access sources. In this he is spot-on. Open sources really do live or die on attribution; without this, open access will wither away — and academic innovation with it. This is a matter of great personal consequence for me, for I have made my work openly accessible. More than that, like Dunleavy, I have released my work under generous copyright terms by using open content licensing (in my case, the Creative Commons Public License).
Dunleavy and I are far from unique in this regard. We are also far from unique in that before doing these things, we (I will assume “we” rather than just “I”) read extensively and thought deeply about questions of access, primacy, and authorship; and (again I will assume “we”) we continue to read extensively and think deeply about these questions today. I know that I cannot afford to do otherwise.
To be sure, accurate citations are about more than giving credit, but first and foremost is the act of giving credit where credit is due. For me, for other innovators and creators, and for the communities of innovators and researchers who need access to the fullest knowledge-base possible in order to build and expand and contribute, accurate citations — both of original sources, and of the layers of sources that follow — are the bedrock that supports understanding and creation. There is no “merely” about this.
Postscript: It occurs to me that Dunleavy might not have written the headline with “merely” in it, or he might have intended it as a legitimate way of emphasizing his focus in the article. It also occurs to me that I jumped all over that word, and that the rest of what Dunleavy has to say (beginning with the quote from Robert Merton) has no “merely” to it. In this sense, I’m yet another participant in another widespread problem on the internet: Cherry picking and criticizing a word or a sentence, decontextualizing other people’s commets in order to make a point. There is, of course, no “merely” about that, either.
'The significance of citations goes far beyond energising and rewarding academic competition. Patrick Dunleavy outlines why citations are so important; from setting up a specialist discourse in an economical and highly-focused manner, guiding readers seeking to follow your extended chain of reasoning, right through to showing you have comprehensively surveyed all relevant work and pointed out its consistencies (or otherwise) with your own findings. A better appreciation of the multiple functions of citations should help to address the chronic under-citation that particularly besets the humanities and social sciences.'
| The significance of citations goes far beyond energising and rewarding academic competition. Patrick Dunleavy outlines why citations are so important; from setting up a specialist discourse in an e… |
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"Education either functions as an instrument which is used to facilitate integration of the younger generation into the logic of
the present system and bring about conformity or it becomes the practice of freedom, the means by which men and women
deal critically and creatively with reality and discover how to participate in the transformation of their world."
Paulo Freire (Pedagogy of the Oppressed)
