Presumably when a scientist uses one of Maxwell’s equations in a paper, he does not need to cite Maxwell’s original papers, and when F=ma is used the author need not cite Newton’s Principia. However, a discovery published in a paper the year before would need to be cited.
At what point would a discovery become accepted enough for it to not need a citation in a scientific paper?
There are no real rules. If everybody in your likely audience is likely to know and accept something as uncontroversial, you do not need to cite it. Indeed, citing stuff that is too obvious makes you look like a rube. It is a judgment call, and different disciplines will have different citation conventions.
When you are a conservative
The rule of thumb I use in my class is if the info is in a general textbook, it’s considered common knowledge to those in the field. This is for undergraduate level science research papers.
This is a pretty good rule of thumb also for higher level research papers.
Although, I did see a paper a few months ago that had cites to works by Laplace and Lemaitre.
The term that you want here is “general knowledge”. Information does not need to be cited if it is general knowledge.
This is dependent on context, so what is “general knowledge” to a reader of a scientific journal is not necessarily “general knowledge” to an undergraduate student. So, some complex biochemical process might not need to be cited in the New England Journal of Medicine but might need to be cited in a paper for Biology 250 at State U.
Ah, thank you for the correct term. I was thinking of ‘common knowledge’ when I was writing the post, but that did not seem to be correct.
Thank you to everyone else who replied, too.
Political jabs are not allowed in GQ. Stop.
It also varies by scientific fields.
I don’t recall where I read it, but the comment was that:
Chemists tend to cite everything back to the origin of chemistry, while physicists cite only God & Einstein.
Unfortunately, in many Engineering journals pretty much no citations are ever given, and IMO that is very wrong.
Psychologists, for some bizarre reason, cite everything. My undergraduate intro to psych textbook was filled with inline citations. I never saw anything like that in other science textbooks, but apparently the APA is into it.
when i was making a full-blown paper, all basic data gathered from the library (present and past ) were mentioned. previous works were all cited, even from classical literature. during the analysis stage, all un-observed premises were followed by someone’s name and year. it was only in my own data gathering where i didn’t have to mention someone else’s name.
i used the kate turabian manual, btw.
I think the only real answer is “when the peer reviewers allow it”.
I’ve read papers that cited Aristotle and Pliny the Elder. I assumed the author was trying to hard to be cute.