From Citation Amnesia to Bibliographic Plagiarism

You know the feeling—while reading an article on a topic related to your own research, you gradually become aware of a strong similarity between the ideas expressed and those you published some time ago. A quick glance at the references cited shows you that your article isn’t mentioned. If the author is known to you, and you are confident that he or she knows about your work, then you have to decide whether the omission was deliberate or whether it was just forgetfulness. However, if the author is not known to you, it is possible that he or she is not familiar with your work. This can happen when the paper is from a different field. I’ve read dozens of papers on citation analysis that couldn’t have been written without using data compiled at ISP andl or published in the Science Cita tion Index” LSC~). That 1S1 isn’t mentioned or credited with an appropriate citation is admittedly annoying but not entirely unexpected. When an author commits a bibliographic oversight of one kind or another I usually send him a reprint. This happens to me occasionally after I’ve written an essay in Current