3 thoughts on “How you talk about your friends”

1. I’m not sure about other fields, but in a lot of the jour­nals I read (e.g., Phys­i­cal Review Let­ters), cita­tions are sim­ply num­bers in square brack­ets. I like it! Sig­nif­i­cantly more than super­script num­bers, and I think even more than names and dates interupt­ing the flow of a sentence.

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2. I also much pre­fer the num­bers in square brack­ets approach of Phys­i­cal Review over alter­na­tives, e.g., Chicago Style (Friend and Friend, 2000) or the ambigu­ous par­en­thet­i­cal style (2), and espe­cially over the sim­i­larly con­fus­ing super­script style that Nature likes. The two key advan­tages are a clear dis­am­bigua­tion from other kinds of nota­tion (e.g., real par­en­thet­i­cal state­ments or equa­tion ref­er­ences, and real foot­notes or expo­nen­ti­a­tions), and more impor­tantly a com­pact way to refer the inter­ested reader to rel­e­vant past work. That being said, when I get cited using vari­a­tions of the Chicago style, my ego does pleas­antly inflate an incre­men­tal amount to see my name in print. But really, is that any basis for an entire cita­tion system?

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3. This is a test com­ment, but I’ll make it sub­stan­tive anyhow.

   Most of what I read con­forms to the Uni­form Require­ments for Man­u­scripts Sub­mit­ted To Bio­med­ical Jour­nals, approved by the Inter­na­tional Com­mit­tee of Med­ical Jour­nal Edi­tors in 2005. Cur­rent sub­scribers to these Require­ments include the New Eng­land Jour­nal of Med­i­cine, Jour­nal of the Amer­i­can Med­ical Asso­ci­a­tion, the British Med­ical Jour­nal, the Lancet, the Annals of Epi­demi­ol­ogy, and the U.S. National Library of Med­i­cine. This par­tic­u­lar set of guide­lines man­dates the use of ara­bic numer­als in paren­the­ses for in-​​text cita­tions, with an excep­tion for essen­tial per­sonal com­mu­ni­ca­tions, which must be cited with the com­mu­ni­cants name and the date of the com­mu­ni­ca­tion in paren­the­ses in the text.

   What I’ve noticed recently is a trend towards strict use of this style alone, with no men­tion of the cited author(s) name(s), in the Intro­duc­tion and Meth­ods sec­tions of bio­med­ical arti­cles. In the Dis­cus­sion sec­tion, how­ever, it is still fairly com­mon to find the author(s) name(s) fol­lowed by the (#) tag for in-​​text ref­er­ences to pre­vi­ous or con­cur­rent work rel­e­vant to the work pre­sented in the arti­cle. That was the way I ref­er­enced every­thing in my dis­ser­ta­tion, before I had ever heard of the Chicago style or any other stan­dard for­mat. I just thought it was impor­tant for the reader of my dis­ser­ta­tion (assum­ing that there might actu­ally be one–my best friend advised me to have my dis­ser­ta­tion bound on all four sides) to get to know the names of the peo­ple who came before me in my area. Per­son­ally, I dis­like the stric­tures in tech­ni­cal writ­ing that have tended to deper­son­al­ize the research endeav­our, i.e. state­ments that “A pre­vi­ous study showed…” (#) rather than “Doe et. al. found…” (#) and using the pas­sive voice all the time. Sci­ence is done by peo­ple in the first per­son. Con­sign­ing the names of those real peo­ple to the Ref­er­ences sec­tion means that many, if not most, jour­nal arti­cle read­ers will sel­dom get to know who all has been or is active in a field because they will not take the time to read the full references.

   End of rant.

   [Ed:  rewrapped]

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