Samenvatting

The intensification of scientific competition and the availability of scientific knowledge on the internet seem to be rendering the notion of intellectual property obsolete. Conventional citation- and referencing practices through which intellectual debt is acknowledged are increasingly being ignored or undermined. In this essay, it is argued that these conventional citation- and referencing practices represent valuable norms of scientific conduct and, therefore, are vital to the scientific ethos of free and independent scientific research. For this reason, editors and reviewers need to accept their responsibility for educating the next generation of scholars to respect conventions for acknowledging intellectual debt.