[seqfan] Re: On ethics

[Charles Greathouse]

> Suppose that you are writing a paper about sequence A. Should you refer to comments and links of this sequence?

I think that would be courteous if the comments told you something you
didn't know, and obligatory if you couldn't prove it yourself.  But
most of the comments in the OEIS are fairly straightforward.  For
example, I wrote

Apart from a(2), a(n) is in {0, 1, 2}. Almost all terms are 0 by the
Prime Number Theorem.

in A176851.  But if a person was writing about that sequence, this
would surely be obvious -- indeed, if I saw this in a paper I would
sooner assume that the author had come to that conclusion
independently than that they had copied it.

But I don't think this is any different from the usual academic
standards.  I don't cite Bartle & Sherbert when I show that an
unbounded function is not Riemann-integrable.

Charles Greathouse
Analyst/Programmer
Case Western Reserve University