Scientists are not acrobats

No, we are not acrobats, we do not stand on the shoulders of giants. We are in the field created by human thought-and nothing more. This field is covered by an almost limitless, immense ornament of scientific structures. And when the scientist writes an article he/she should first of all indicate how it is linked with separate fragments of this ornament. This is the main task of citations. Cited items represent primarily a system of indices. Some authors manage to make an apt choice, others are not so skillful. Everything depends on how well the author can take into account the degree of readiness of the potential reader. The adequacy of citations should be evaluated from this viewpoint. It is of no use to say that citations are biased: their choice is always determined by a system of preferences set by the author, as this system of preferences is manifested in the article proper. The requirement to reflect the complete knowledge on the basis of which an article was written should not be applied to citations. Such a complete reflection would be absurd3? cumbersome. Here is an illustration. One of my post-graduates once studied a system of citations pertaining to the first years of publication of scientific journals. It contained permanent citations to Aristotle. Later they quite naturally disappeared. But if now we had had to prepare an article for a creature from another planet we should have included a citation to Aristotle to explain our devotion to syllogistics. Proceeding from this type of considerations we would have to include citations to Descartes and Newton, as v~ell as to all those who were at the source of our scientific paradigm. Another example. I am responsible for the activities of the editorial board of the mathematical section in a journal of a nonmathematlcal trend. The papers published there are little cited. But we, members of the editorial board, being quite aware of the situation, go on with our activities, since we hope that in this way we prepare the soil for some noticeable seeds.