Academic Citation

One of my New Year's blogolutions was to clear out my to-blog folder, and bring closure to my unfinished drafts by simply posting them as-is. This is one of those drafts. Disorganized paragraphs, unfinished sentences, and general incoherence enhance the natural character and beauty of a half-written blog post and should not be considered flaws or defects.

Draft date: April 18, 2008

There's a related discussion happening now at All of My Faults Are Stress-Related.

So far, the part of scientific paper-writing I hate the most - I mean, apart from all the wailing and gnashing of teeth over various issues related to the actual science - is proofreading the bibliography. I use BibDesk for my auto-bibliography reference management magic, but I have yet to encounter a BibTeX style sheet that works perfectly without human post-processing. So I manually tweak and triple-check my reference list. It makes my eyeballs leak ichor.

But it's got me thinking about the purpose of academic citation.
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