On 18/11/13 14:15, Russel Winder wrote:
The very worst thing for me in terms of citation is ones like (personal communication, 1984). I banned that one.
Personally I do think there's a value to that, simply as a means of giving credit to someone who contributed an idea or unpublished result that turned out to be fruitful but didn't have enough involvement in the work to really count as an author. Though I favour the solution journals like Nature came up with, which is to have that citation in the text but not the reference list, like this (A. N. Other, personal communication) and not like this [1]
[1] S. B. D. Else, personal communication.
Citations are to archived material that has a 99.999999% chance of being accessible in 15 years time
There's a certain irony in the fact that, given the constraints of print publication, various books and journal articles are now in many ways much _less_ accessible than supposedly ephemeral URLs.
