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A Campaign for Better Citation and Credit-Giving Practices in Philosophy?

In light of recent discussions raising questions about citation and credit-giving practices in academic philosophy, I have tentatively launched a new blog, "The Campaign for Better Citation and Credit-Giving Practices in Philosophy", to serve as a forum to share and address systematic problems in these areas.

As the blog's Mission Statement makes clear, the blog will NOT function as a forum to post any accusations against particular authors, articles, etc (such things will not be permitted). Instead, the blog is a place where individuals can submit posts arguing that particular works/authors have be under-cited/under-recognized in a given body of literature as a whole. In other words, the blog aims to merely serve as a forum to rectify cases of systematic omission–a forum for people to argue that specific works that (1) contributed substantially to some debate in philosophy, have (2) for some reason or another, not received due citation or credit in that literature as a whole. 

I believe that this is a worthy endeavor worth attempting, and have begun the new blog as a tentative attempt to do it in a positive (rather than accusatory) way. Philosophers who have not received due credit for their contributions should receive such credit, and I hope the new blog can provide a positive forum for helping to accomplish that.

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3 responses to “A Campaign for Better Citation and Credit-Giving Practices in Philosophy?”

  1. anon

    Marcus, this is a really, really great start to addressing an important issue. Thank you so much!

    Reply
  2. Marcus Arvan

    Thanks, anon! 🙂

    Reply
  3. Walter

    Hello Marcus,
    Thought you might enjoy this. I just got Frederick Schauer’s The Force of Law (Harvard 2015). Just after the preface, he has a “Note about the Notes.” He writes that HLA Hart “thought it useful to emphasize that he was not writing a book about other books”, so “his references were sparse, and, unconventionally at the time for scholarly writing, tucked away at the back of the book” (xiii).
    Schauer laments the fact that many works today take this approach and thus contain “woefully” few references to other works. He thinks we should stop doing this. He writes that
    “Scholarship is a collective enterprise, and scholarly works with few references tend to exaggerate the novelty of the author’s contributions, ignore the extent to which the work builds on what has been done by others, and provide scant assistance to the reader seeking informed guidance to other writings and the place of the instant work in the relevant scholarly environment. Accordingly, I believe it far better to provide too many references than too few. If these references can provide biographical assistance to the reader … that will be a valuable service. If they can make clear that my contributions build on those of others and are situated within a larger community of scholarship and scholars, that will be more valuable still.” (xiii)
    The eleven substantive chapters that make up Schauer’s book are a combined 168 pages long. The footnotes with references are tucked away at the back of the book (they can be distracting, he concedes) but they make up 62 additional pages.

    Reply

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