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The following item appears in the $\LaTeX$ style-guide for the Journal of Integer Sequences: JIS excerpt

To me this seems correct and reasonable, but it in most articles I read, authors tend toward the first example of "wrong" usage. Is this simply journal-specific, or is it abusive to use "In [1]..."?

Pietro Paparella
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    It's just sloppy writing,"abusive" seems much too strong a qualification. I do think "In Ref. 1..." is OK, as equivalent to "In reference number 1..." – Carlo Beenakker Oct 05 '20 at 17:20
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    Many articles are more or less sloppy indeed, so I'd say the bare fact that (1) and (2) among your examples are common shows you won't be blamed for writing this, but doesn't make it good usage. I think these are good recommendations in general. Some editors/publishers follow this rule. Of course, when [1] is quoted repeatedly, it's a good reason for quoting them once and for all. Another case is a sentence where the "abuse" is understandable: "Similar problems have been considered in [2,3,5,7,11,13,17,19,23]." which would be lengthy otherwise. – YCor Oct 05 '20 at 17:36
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    I will go even farther and say that in my opinion there's nothing wrong with using a citation number as an object of a preposition. – Ira Gessel Oct 05 '20 at 17:43
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    This seems like fussy advice. [1] stands for "Adler - Refined anisotropic K-types" (in most of my papers, anyway); setting up this correspondence is what the bibliography is there to do. Thus, "In [1] …" means "In Adler - Refined anisotropic K-types …", which is very near being perfectly grammatical. Let anyone who has a problem with it fuss over splitting infinitives instead. – LSpice Oct 05 '20 at 18:02
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    In my experience, these journal style guides are largely ignored. – Federico Poloni Oct 05 '20 at 19:31
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    Related: https://mathoverflow.net/q/247743 and https://mathoverflow.net/q/237946 – Timothy Chow Oct 05 '20 at 23:03
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    I think this style guide instruction is unacceptably pedantic. – David Handelman Oct 06 '20 at 00:36
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    If that was the worst thing mathematical writers did wrong, their papers would be a lot more pleasant to read. – bof Oct 06 '20 at 04:39
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    I always use the "wrong" variant, as it seems the only grammatically reasonable thing to do. Why would one write something that is treated like footnotes not as footnotes? – Fred Rohrer Oct 06 '20 at 04:39
  • Though that guide has some useful tips, there are other things wrong with it. Instead of 4.15, just use \dots (from amsmath). – Ari Brodsky Oct 06 '20 at 10:27
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    @AriBrodsky : \dots usually works but not always. To make its decision, it looks at the following character, which does not always tell it the correct thing to do. – Timothy Chow Oct 06 '20 at 12:07
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    It would have been great if the guideline had justified its recommendations. Some of them are absolutely pedantic. For example, I find it a bit dumb to recommend using "zero" instead of "root" for polynomials. Nothing wrong with the word "zero" but when using Descartes' Rule of Signs (for example), one has to speak of "positive zeros" or "negative zeros", and sometimes of "nonzero zeros"! An alternative is welcome. – Taladris Oct 06 '20 at 14:21
  • What about an "indirect citation", like "[...] it is known that in every right-angled triangle, the squares of the catheti summed equal the square of the hypotenuse [1]. By this fact [...]"? It is somehow placed like a footnote, I actually like it. – StefanH Oct 06 '20 at 14:30
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    Related on Academia: https://academia.stackexchange.com/q/49487/20058 – Massimo Ortolano Oct 06 '20 at 17:55

1 Answers1

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I don't think this kind of thing is "abusive." I'm certain I've done it in my own writing before, and I can think of several scenarios where it's better than the alternative:

(1) If a citation has no author, like a collaboratively edited industry standard for some software.

(2) If a citation has many authors and it's awkward to write "Smith, et. al. proved ... [1]"

(3) If a citation is an edited volume and it's unclear who contributed the thing you need to cite.

Generally, I think the guiding principle should be to do whatever will make your writing easier for the reader. It seems to me that there are many times when the reader just needs to know the result and which citation they should look it up in, rather than who was the first author on the paper where that result appears. Much more important to me than the question of whether I write "In [1], the authors prove..." instead of "So and so proved ... [1]" is that the citation contain a more precise reference, like Theorem 5.3.2 instead of just citing a 1000 page book and leaving the reader to go hunting for the result.

David White
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    +1000 for your last sentence! – Jochen Glueck Oct 05 '20 at 18:00
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    A favourite of mine is to find out that [1] is a citation to all 10 parts of a 10-part paper. This is bad enough when done by someone else, but when done by the author of those papers who should know (or be able to grep the TeX of) the contents, it is downright annoying. (It's better than "the result is well known", at least.) – LSpice Oct 05 '20 at 18:04
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    I just checked a few pages from one of my own papers and found that about half of the citations there are "wrong". So "wrong" must not really be wrong. – Andreas Blass Oct 05 '20 at 18:39
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    I also would like to mention that using the name of the first author is annoying for the alphabetically challenged among us... – Denis Nardin Oct 06 '20 at 16:05