4. Acknowledgements

Acknowledgements is the most important thing in a published report, a published paper and probably also in privately circulated reports. For reasons that I do not fully understand, scientists are amazingly, incredi­bly sensitive about having their contributions acknowledged. It's psy­chotic in many cases. I've known quarrels of thirty years duration arise because somebody didn't acknowledge the fact that somebody else said something that may have helped him or that had written an earlier paper in this particular field. My thesis supervisor, an old and far wiser man, said, "Look Ernie. You know, it's a trivial issue – you've got forty-three references already. Put in forty-four and you'll keep this guy happy and so what?" And I think that's a wise attitude… It's so easy. It's a trivial thing. It takes up about five lines in a text and it's generally wiser to make this list of acknowledgements a little larger than you think it really ought to have been.

5. References

Well, now we come to the references. The two aspects of that – the first one is, you know, you really ought to put in as many references as are appropriate in the paper. In terms of information the references are the most concentrated part of the paper. You can supply the reader with more information by a page of references than you can by a page of almost any other part of the paper. I hate to see a paper with no references whatever. It makes me think the author's trying to give the impression that he invented this field all by himself. It doesn't make it easy to go back and, you know, and learn a little more about this par­ticular field. On the other hand, a well-chosen list of references can really help a reader who wants to pursue a subject further, he can find out what the author knew when he started, what earlier work there's been in the area and it really can be awfully helpful.

How these references are listed is a standing dispute. Every journal, every organization has one method of listing references and no other is accepted. You know, like do you put the initials before the author? Do you put the date or the year right after the author or right at the end?

You'd be surprised how many combinations of methods there are. I think that I worked out the other day that there are at least two thousand generally accepted methods of producing references. And for each jour­nal or each organization that produces reports, there's generally only one correct method. Well, don't fight it! Join it! I mean nothing is gained by starting a campaign that your method of producing references is bet­ter. The only thing where I think some initiative is allowed, for example, on whether to cite the title of an article – some organizations give you certain leeway on that. On that I'm convinced that you always want to put in the title of an article, it helps the reader a lot in deciding whether to go on with it or not.

If you're citing a foreign paper you often have a choice. You can display your erudition by giving the title in whatever foreign language the paper was in and leaving it that way, and then that leaves all the readers who don't know that for­eign language just saying, "Gee, this guy's obviously smart but so what?" I think the only appropriate method is to give a translation of the title into English and then at the brackets comment to the fact that the orig­inal paper was in Russian or German or Hindustani – whatever lan­guage it was in. But, I don't think it helps, for scientists, anyway, maybe different, to give the title in Spanish say, and just leave it at that and hope that something will happen, because nothing will happen.