>>13885936>>13883427>>13883411>>13883397The purpose of citations is not to show how smart and educated you are and how many papers and books you've read. The purpose of citations is to provide historical context and to give credit to the original authors. You do not need to actually read a paper too cite it, which is why papers often have a fuck ton of references. Especially in the empirical sciences like biology, you will often just browse a paper for a piece of data, without actually reading it, but you're still supposed to cite the paper. That's why biology publications always have like 5-10 pages of references. Math papers don't seem to be as bloated when it comes to citations, but they still contain a lot of citations, and if you use a theorem, you typically cite the original source whether that's where you got it or not. For example, if you read a paper on combinatorics, and you use some theorem of Paul Erdos that is a standard result in combinatorics textbooks, you're supposed to cite Erdos's original paper, rather than finding some random combinatorics textbook that includes the result.
Sometimes you will also see citations like "originally by X, as reported in Y", if you are reading a paper or book Y that references another source X.
