Scientific Citation

Scientific citation is providing detailed reference in a scientific publication, typically a paper or book, to previous published (or occasionally private) communications which have a bearing on the subject of the new publication. The purpose of citations in original work is to allow readers of the paper to refer to cited work to assist them in judging the new work, source background information vital for future development, and acknowledge the contributions of earlier workers. Citations in, say, a review paper bring together many sources, often recent, in one place.

To a considerable extent the quality of work, in the absence of other criteria, is judged on the number of citations received, adjusting for the volume of work in the relevant topic. While this is not necessarily a reliable measure, counting citations is trivially easy; judging the merit of complex work can be very difficult.

Previous work may be cited regarding experimental procedures, apparatus, goals, previous theoretical results upon which the new work builds, theses, and so on. Typically such citations establish the general framework of influences and the mindset of research, and especially as "part of what science" it is, and to help determine who conducts the peer review.

In the mathematically-predictive hard sciences developing arguments 'from fundamentals' would usually involve a very long repetition of known work, and is not practicable; some reliance on authoritative prior scientific consensus is the norm, either with citation or not, e.g. a paper invoking Newton's laws of motion, formulated in 1687, does not in general include a formal citation to Isaac Newton, although it is implied. More recent, and particularly controversial, work is cited.

In the more model-driven 'soft' or 'human' sciences, where prediction and experiment and controls are less common, citation is viewed somewhat differently. Terminology rather than logic is the key to an effective peer review, and so citation establishes the glossary and the definitions which the reviewers should keep in mind while reading. The number of citations should still be few, as there is risk of some 'name space clash', resulting in confusion or inexact application of abstractions to concretes. This constraint tends to make papers in the soft sciences more clearly associated with a 'school of thought' and more explicitly dependent on readers' knowledge of some body of prior knowledge.

Disciplined citation of prior works in mathematics and science is known at least as far back as Euclid. Late in the first millennium, Islamic scholars developed their practice of isnad, or "backing", which established the validity of sayings of Muhammad in the hadith. The Asharite school of early Muslim philosophy extended this into fiqh or jurisprudence, while the Mutazilite school used the traditional methods and applied them to science.

In some form, then, achieving authority for new work by citing accepted authorities is a near-universal idea among the peoples of the Mediterranean, whose educated people were exposed to one or other of these practices well before the European Renaissance and the emergence of the formal scientific method.