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Comment by jhbadger | Hacker News Reader

At least in biology, a lot of journals have been cracking down on "personal/private communication" citations lately -- the point of a citation isn't just to give credit, but to tell the reader where to find the info, and chatting with your friend isn't a realistic option for that. If it is unpublished, and is important enough to be cited, then you should make the friend a co-author and include the info in your paper. That is a different case than an arxiv paper, though.

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Of course the info needs to be included in the paper if it cannot be found elsewhere. I didn't want to imply otherwise. Whether the friend needs to be a co-author is of course up to them and certainly depends on the size of the contribution, but that is beside the point of both citing the source of a certain idea and making sure the reader is able to verify its validity.

In fact, I personally lean towards often including arguments even if they can be found in sources you cite. If you can provide a much clearer argument than the source (and it doesn't detract from your own work), you should include the improved one in your work. If it is a minor detail that is both worth citing as well as easy to include, then I think you should include it to avoid requiring the reader to hop around from paper to paper to get an understanding of your work. You should make your work as accessible to the reader as possible.

I'd argue that the latter purpose---allowing the reader to recover the original sources and arguments to your thinking---is more important than the 'giving credit' one. If a conversation or email exchange with someone was indeed critical to the development of your ideas, then you offer them co-authorship, not a "citation' to something not only unpublished but undocumented. If it was only incidental to the thinking, then no citation is necessary.

I will note that many a graduate supervisor or lab administrator has been offered (or simply taken) co-authorship for a far more scant contribution than a key conversation.

This doesn't make any sense to me, at least coming from mathematics.

If I'm writing writing a paper about my ideas, it would be unethical to "make my friend a co-author" if my friend didn't contribute to those ideas.

Yes, it would be strongly preferable to tell readers where they can find the info you are citing. But if that info is unpublished, then that's life.

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