Citation, credit, and the ambiguous nature of creative science—a wider perspective for Bruun's views

Abstract

Hans Henrik Bruun (2014) argues that, although assigning credit to past work is important, it is not something that can easily be set about with formal rules—leading to charges of plagiarism if the rules are not followed to the letter. He goes further to suggest that such strict rules may actually stifle creative science and that, in this context, a much greater problem may be the large number of so-called ‘original’ research papers that do no more than reproduce previous findings in new settings (I have much sympathy with this last point, while noting that such studies are also crucial to the meta analysis approach to ecological questions!). Bruun (2014) develops his ideas in the context of ecological examples—here I try to provide a brief, wider context for the discussion drawing on several different areas of science from astronomy to molecular biology. A scientist’s reputation stands or falls on conceiving new ideas or collecting original data. Although there may be a considerable satisfaction in just working in an area of personal fascination irrespective of any credit (this is certainly true of many ecologists with a natural history background), credit does matter. One of the more interesting discussions of this is actually fictional—the novel The Bourbaki gambit by chemist turned novelist and playwright Carl Djerassi (1994). In the novel, a group of late career and somewhat marginalised scientists group together to have fun publishing under a single pseudonym. This scheme falls apart when they discover something truly important (in this alternative history novel, they invent PCR) and suddenly personal priority really matters! If reputation matters so much then surely a rigorous approach to citation matters too (indeed I believe it does but, as with Bruun, I don’t see it as the most important thing in the long term). There is a very practical problem with an insistence on citing the first original source—it’s often completely ambiguous what you should be citing! Most ideas in science emerge over time and don’t suddenly appear in the literature in their final form. The obvious example for the readership of an ecology and evolution journal being the very similar evolutionary ideas of Darwin and Wallace—which do you cite? In fact, it’s more complex than that, as a trawl through the pre-1858 literature can produce many brief discussions that seem to have at least part of the idea of natural selection, and there is a huge pre-Darwinian literature on the general idea of evolution. Should you cite them all? However, Darwin’s (1859) book not only introduced a range of novel theories but made them prominent. Indeed, in an interesting recent counterfactual history, Bowler (2013) suggests that without this book (i.e., if Darwin had drowned at sea in 1832), even allowing for Wallace’s work, modern evolutionary ideas would have emerged much more slowly than was the case in the real 19 th