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I liked Robin Foliet Neill's post in this thread.  The original question 
pertained to failures to cite sources containing the ideas that one 
attributes to oneself.  Neill puts the issue in a broader context, noting 
a related phenomenon:  "citing an author while moving the substance of the 
author's material into an alternative and competing paradigm." 
 
In this case, citation actually does occur, after a fashion.  There is, 
however, another closely related practice in which citation is *not* made. 
 It is the failure to cite views and even counter-demonstrations contrary 
to one's own position. 
 
In the case I know best, for instance, it is now pretty well known, and it 
has been demonstrated, that the internal inconsistencies or errors 
ascribed to Marx's value theory and law of the falling rate of profit in 
fact stem from one (Bortkiewicz's) particular interpretation.  If values 
and prices are conceived as being determined in historical time, not 
simultaneously, and if the "value of capital advanced" is understood as 
the sum of value needed to acquire inputs, not the values of the inputs 
themselves, then Marx's conclusions do follow from his premises. 
 
Yet the mainstream -- non-Marxist AND Marxist -- literature 
systematically fails to cite these counter-demonstrations.  For instance, 
none of the authors involved in the 1995 HOPE symposium refer to it.  In 
some cases, of course, this is the fault, not of the author, but of other 
authors who have suppressed the findings, so that the one now writing is 
not aware of them.  There are, however, numerous (and easily documented) 
cases in which authors who are aware of these findings do not mention 
them. 
 
Andrew Kliman 
 
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