I recently had an unusual experience. I received critical feedback about a paper; not for failing to cite someone, but for citing them too generously. A colleague objected to a sentence in my introduction that described another researcher’s contributions as “important” to a body of theory. The objection wasn’t that the characterization was inaccurate. It was that I was giving too much credit to someone who, in my colleague’s view, didn’t deserve the recognition.
This was new to me. I’ve received comments about insufficient citation before, we all likely have. But pushback for excessive generosity? That inverted things I thought I understood about how credit works in academia.
The exchange made me think more carefully about what we’re actually doing when we attribute ideas to people.
Credit as Territory
The standard view is that citation is acknowledgment. You note who contributed what, and the scholarly record remains intact. But attribution does more than acknowledge. It maps the intellectual landscape. When you name someone as the originator or key developer of an idea, you’re placing a landmark on that map. And everyone else in the field has to locate themselves relative to it.
This means generous credit to one person can feel like displacement to another. If I write that Professor X developed the foundational framework for some area of theory, I’m implicitly saying that others, including people who may have made comparable contributions, are secondary. The map has only so much room for landmarks.
My colleague’s reaction wasn’t really about my sentence. It was about the map I was drawing and where it left others.
The Weight of a Single Word
What struck me was how much heat a single word could generate. Calling someone’s work “important” seems innocuous, descriptive, even. The work is widely cited; the person is well known; “important” simply reports that fact.
But descriptive language about reputation slides easily into endorsement. The word doesn’t just report that someone is prominent; it ratifies that prominence. For someone who believes the reputation is unearned, built on hype, or on credit that should have been shared more widely, a word choice can be non neutral. It was a small act of injustice, one more instance of the field rewarding the wrong people.
I don’t think I was wrong to use the word. But I now understand why it landed the way it did.
The Hidden Costs of Generosity
Academics are trained to cite carefully and to err on the side of giving credit. The risks of under-citation are well understood: you may appear to be claiming too much for yourself, or you may slight someone whose work preceded yours. The safe path is generosity.
But this advice assumes credit is zero-sum only between you and the person you’re citing. In reality, credit exists in a web of competing claims. Every field has its priority disputes, its resentments, its long memories of who got recognition and who was overlooked. When you generously attribute an idea to one person, you’re taking a position in disputes you may not even know exist.
This isn’t an argument against giving credit. It’s an observation that generosity toward one node in the network can register as slight toward others. There’s no way to cite your way out of this. The web exists whether you attend to it or not.
Inherited Grievances
The most disorienting aspect of my experience was realizing that the reaction I received wasn’t really about me. My colleague’s frustration had a history that predated my paper by years. I had stumbled into a dispute I didn’t create, and my sentence, one of many similar sentences one could find in the literature, became a proxy for grievances I had no part in.
What do you do in this situation? I’m not sure there’s a good answer. I responded briefly, acknowledged that I would consider revising the language, and didn’t engage with the substance of the underlying dispute. That felt right, or at least not wrong. You cannot resolve what isn’t yours.
But it left me aware that academic writing is never fully separable from academic politics. The sentences we write enter a social world with histories we don’t control.
What I Learned
None of this is what we’re trained to think about. Graduate school teaches you to cite accurately, to acknowledge intellectual debts, to be generous rather than stingy with credit. It doesn’t teach you that generosity itself can be contentious, or that a single word can activate years of accumulated grievance, or that your citations position you in disputes you never chose to enter.
I don’t think there’s a clean lesson here. Perhaps just this: the political dimension of citation is real, even if we prefer to believe that scholarship floats above it. It doesn’t. Our sentences land in a world of competing claims, long memories, and positional anxiety. We can try to navigate that world thoughtfully. But we can’t pretend it isn’t there.