Citation Practices

One reason to write “please don’t cite without my permission” on a paper posted online is to ensure that you learn who is working on/looking at your stuff, so that you can update that person with a corrected version, or have a conversation with that person. When people have wanted to cite my stuff, I always give permission, but it is nice to know who they are and what there take on the stuff is.

So the thought is: it’s ok to put “don’t cite without permission”, but in practice you should probably always give permission to cite.

I agree with Kris. When I see that request on a draft, it tells me to contact the author for the latest version before my final response/next development. So far authors (some quite famous)have always thanked me and sent a copy of the latest version, or said “go ahead and quote that.” I usually ask about pre-pub papers even when there is no note on the cover, just to find out if it has been published somewhere, so that I can cite the “canonical” version and make it easier for any of my readers to follow up.

Although I now see Brian’s point, that the web is actually the easiest place to find copies, and thus IS better canonical citation.

Is there a better way to indicate “go ahead and cite me, but please email to make sure you have the most current version” without (what some see as) the weasely connotations?

Right, “public domain” is a legal term having to do with copyright that would not be applicable here. But I don’t think that is what Ross Cameron meant, since it isn’t relevant to citation.

Yes, agreed with Kris and Vivian etc. It’s fair to say “I’d rather you not cite, or especially quote, this version of the paper if I’ve written a more recent version.”

In ye olden days, when you might circulate the conference version of your paper to one person (the discussant) or four (the panelists) or at most a couple dozen (we used to have an official obligation to make 50 copies available at APSA), and it was clear that “published” was the only version that counted as “public,” you could try lots of attempts at getting wording right and arguments right before you riskedliving in infamy as the person who said X stupid thing. The line’s a lot blurrier now, but I do think there should still be a stage of “paper I’m not ready to stake my lifetime reputation on, but I want to present to an audience that migh involve circulating it to a small group.”

And, like everyone else, I’ve typically gotten permission, or else the more recent version, when I asked, and given permission, or the more recent version, when someone asked me.

Please do not read or respond to this comment without prior permission of the commenter.

Scripta manent, even on the Web. Even if Heraclitus rewrites his page, Parmenides can locate the first version in Wayback. But he shouldn’t rely on that page as representing Heraclitus’ current views. (Can he ever catch up with them, as with Achilles and the tortoise?)
In practice, isn’t it enough for authors just to write “draft” or “provisional” and expect anyone referring to it to note that character? You could also use “beta”, which has the handy connotation “no guarantees, probably has bugs, use at your own risk”.

I imagine that, as a practice, people in the academy could start forming the practice of either titling documents available on the web “DRAFT: [Insert title here]” and require that any citations include the word “DRAFT” in them. In this way, it would signal to readers of the citation that: 1. This is probably not the final version – go look up the final version; and 2. still provide the benefits to the community that Brian cites.

Also, following up on j.ellenburg’s comment – in many disciplines (mine is sociology), conference papers are often preliminary conclusions. This means that the conclusions could be based on models that are not fully vetted or the dataset is so new that there has not been time to properly clean the variables. Now, in reality, it would be bad practice to present results that you suspect might be wildly incorrect (for the embarrassment of publishing something opposite of what you claimed in a conference), but there could be strengths of associations that increase or decrease or fall into or out of significance in the final paper.

I don’t quite understand the hostility toward such notices. Like some others, I have always interpreted them to mean “contact me if you want to do something with this, and I’ll tell you if I’ve got a more recent version, or if I now think this paper stinks to high heaven.” Being cited does benefit the author, but it’s requesting the courtesy of retaining some vestige of control. I’d be less sympathetic if the author used this power to discriminate among would-be citers, but it’s hard to imagine that happening, save insofar as personal relations influence the willingness to petition the author.

One of the reasons I view these more charitably is because I think they indirectly respect the contributions of others — in practice, they allow one to update papers to reflect helpful comments made in the interim, when it matters. True, this could be done by continually replacing posted versions, and particularizing the standard request depending on whether it’s a conference version or something later, but isn’t this getting nit-picky?

Kris @ 1: One reason to write “please don’t cite without my permission” on a paper posted online is to ensure that you learn who is working on/looking at your stuff, so that you can update that person with a corrected version, or have a conversation with that person.

Except that, once you post something on the Web, at least 70% of the people who view it will have found it via search, including such off-the-wall searches as kieran+healy+nude+jpeg or hot+philospher+porn, completely outside the scholarly community and with no attachment whatsoever to academic values of fair play. It’s sort of like putting an open sack of gold coins on your front stoop along with a sign that says “Please don’t steal.”

I’m not from a field that has such notices, and I’ve always assumed that they meant “only quote in a positive manner.” Phrased this way, it’s obviously selfish, but it allows the benefits to the field that were suggested in the post!

Another theory I’ve had is that they actually mean “cite but don’t quote.” I’ve always been absolutely certain that they weren’t to be taken literally, but had some well-defined meaning inside each field that used them. Brian and Ross seem to deny the existence of a convention and take the line literally. In particular, Ross’s discussion of the hypothetical that one would not be given permission to cite is, I think, the problem with the discussion. The denial is simply unacceptable, at least in the conventions (perhaps from other fields) I read in the comments here.

Really interesting thread. My feeling is that, at least in philosophy, there’s a lot of confusion about what this kind of note actually means. Conventions are pretty defective, if a bunch of people in the profession aren’t aware of them, and that seems to me to be the current situation.

I do think that a bunch of grad students/early career researchers are worried that (a) they’ll be missing a trick if they don’t put work up online; and (b) that doing so risks the best ideas being taken up in such a way as to damage their chances of getting the paper published. I personally feel (b) isn’t something to worry about so much, but I do think that people have heartfelt concerns over this. And so it’d be natural if they interpreted the notes we’re talking about — perhaps wrongly — as addressing their concerns.

I like some of the suggestions given above: e.g. putting something into the title of work in progress to indicate this, and if one wishes, to put a note in inviting people to contact you for updated versions. Those sort of proposals just seem less open to misinterpretation than the one under discussion.

Harry says: I’m very inclined to think there is a difference between a paper put up on the web and a conference presentation.

But the difficulty is that papers presented at conferences are now often expected to be posted online.

I think there’s some room for discrimination among online sources. Something that’s put on SSRN or equivalent is, like papers in official “working paper” series, game for citation as-is. But something posted to the website of a big conference might just be a conference presentation, and there ought to be space for conference presentations to be experimental or incomplete or just wrong.

Alan:
Except that, once you post something on the Web, at least 70% of the people who view it will have found it via search, including such off-the-wall searches as kieran+healy+nude+jpeg or hot+philospher+porn, completely outside the scholarly community and with no attachment whatsoever to academic values of fair play.

Apart from the entertainment value of what Alan just added to google, I think this seems wrong. Such web-surfers who are entirely “outside the scholarly community” aren’t going to have any itnerest in even clicking through to most online working papers, even if the papers happen to turn up in their searches for hot philosopher porn.

Wow – I’ve created a monster!

I would really like to know whether Douglas Knight is right and that there is a convention that this request isn’t to be taken literally. I’ve certainly been reading it as such. So if there is such a convention, it’s perhaps not widely understood that there is such a convention.

The request has certainly caused confusion. I have set (with the author’s permission) works in progress with that request as reading for some of my classes, and I’ve had students worried about whether or not they can cite the paper in their exam!

Sorry for the confusion over the term ‘public domain’. I certainly didn’t mean it in any legal sense. I only meant that if you put something on the web that seems to me to be making it available for public consumption – as such, it seems odd to place a restriction on it being cited.

The case of an author changing their mind is an interesting one. I know of a case of an author writing a very interesting paper on a topic but changing his mind on the whole approach to that topic, and so the original paper remains unpublished. But some of us think his original idea was better than where he’s ended up. What can we do? He doesn’t want that paper cited, because he thinks it’s a completely wrong approach. We want to build on that earlier paper and give him credit for the groundwork, but he doesn’t *want* credit for the groundwork, because he thinks it’s mistaken. To present it as if we came up with the initial ideas ourselves would be terrible, so basically we’re stuck with these ideas that we can’t do anything with. That doesn’t seem quite right to me.

RE #21: I think that the fear of having your ideas stolen is quite real and common, but its worth saying that putting the request not to cite or quote without asking permission will almost certainly have no effect at all on whether they are stolen or not. Some ideas are stolen deliberately and consciously, and others are stolen unconsciously (A recent conversation with a friend revealed that we both believe ideas of ours have been “stolen” by an eminent person, but we also both think that person is completely unaware of having done so). Conference presentations, private conversations, blog discussions, you name it, they all put you at risk of having your ideas stolen, and there’s bugger all you can do about it. Sue? Not worth the effort. They’re only ideas, after all.

In fact, putting something up on the web is probably the best protection possible, because as long as you date it, if you care you can always point to the fact that your instantiation of the idea predates other appearances, if it really is the case that you are first with it. And, if you are too shy or too dignified to do that, others will notice anyway, if you are lucky.

“Please don’t quote or cite”? What kind of request/command is that? That’s like a politician submitting to an interview, and then at the end saying, “By the way, this is all off the record.” Too late, bub! Likewise, if you don’t want to be quoted or cited, don’t publish your words. Geez.

Perhaps it helps to distinguish between different types of quotation. The first type is the authority-quotation: One cites person X because he has said that q is the case (and one has no other argument supporting q). In this case one should obviously in one’s own interest seek (permission and) the newest version of the paper.
The second type is creation-quotation: X has this cool new idea or argument that has helped one’s own ideas on the way, and one wants to give him credit for it. It seems to me a duty of intellectual honesty to give the credits publicly (with permission or without). But it may be done without actually quote anything.
The third type is further reading-quotation: In this case it may be enough to say: check out the website of X …