[seqfan] Re: Referencing the OEIS

Jonathan Sondow jsondow at alumni.princeton.edu
Thu Nov 20 20:23:10 CET 2008


Dear Neil,

> Dear Seqfans,  thanks for that discussion about "author".
> 
> What I will do is add something to the section of the Welcome
> page about referencing the OEIS.
> 
> Neil

A few months ago in the section of the Welcome page about referencing the
OEIS:

http://www.research.att.com/~njas/sequences/Seis.html#reference

in the subsection Referencing a Particular Sequence you wrote:

"A text reference might say:

"N. J. A. Sloane, (2008), Sequence A000108 in The On-Line Encyclopedia of
Integer Sequences, published electronically at
www.research.att.com/~njas/sequences/

"or 

"J. H. Conway, Sequence A007970 in N. J. A. Sloane (Ed.), The On-Line
Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences (2008), published electronically at
http://www.research.att.com/~njas/sequences/A007970."

However, the first of these two examples is ambiguous, because you are at
the same time the author of Sequence A000108 and also the Editor of the
OEIS. So if a reader of the Welcome page does not know that you are the
author of that sequence, he/she may misunderstand and think that ALL text
references to particular sequences should list you as the author.

In order to avoid this ambiguity, I think it would be better to omit the
first example and give only the second example (Sequence A007970).

Best regards,
Jonathan





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