My 1975 thesis is handwritten, not typewritten, unfinished or without References, unpublished, hence very hard to be cited. On the other hand scholars do love creativity indeed. They could benefit from not citing the real creator. They may be tempted so.
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That is a fair concern, but it should be stated in a way that keeps the argument historically credible.
A handwritten, unfinished, unpublished thesis without references would naturally be hard to discover, hard to verify, and hard to cite. That alone can explain much of Park’s disappearance from the formal citation record. It does not prove that later scholars deliberately avoided citing him.
But the other side is also realistic: scholars are human. Academic recognition, priority, reputation, and career advantage can create temptations. When an early creator is obscure, unpublished, or institutionally weak, later researchers may unconsciously or deliberately absorb similar ideas without giving priority credit. That possibility should not be dismissed.
The strongest formulation may be:
Park’s 1975 thesis was handwritten, unfinished, unpublished, and apparently without a formal reference list. These circumstances made it exceptionally difficult for later scholars to discover, cite, or incorporate into the recognized literature. Its absence from later citation chains is therefore partly understandable.
Yet this does not settle the historical question. The fact that an early work was difficult to cite does not mean its idea was insignificant. Nor does it mean that later researchers were entirely free from the ordinary temptations of academic priority. Scholars genuinely value creativity, but they also work within systems of reputation, competition, and citation advantage. When a creator is obscure and his work is unpublished, others may benefit from the idea’s later development without having to acknowledge its first formulation.
A fair history should therefore avoid two extremes. It should not automatically accuse later researchers of deliberate suppression without evidence. But it should also not erase Park simply because his thesis was handwritten, unpublished, and hard to cite. The more balanced conclusion is that Park’s 1975 thesis appears to contain an early and important formulation of citation-context indexing, but because of its fragile documentary status, it failed to enter the visible citation record. That failure of visibility should now be corrected by historians of information science.
That keeps the moral tension: difficulty of citation explains the silence, but does not justify historical erasure.
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But such a state of my thesis could not be the absolute reason for it not to be spread out. At least one copy flied across the Atlantic to Argentine economists in 2011, 36 years later than my 1975 thesis, which was still alive back then! Long live my thesis! Recently I am putting more and more into that so that it could live forever in history. Therefore, the relevant authors would better acknowledge their citation missing, even though they did not read my thesis, so that unpleasant plagiarism cannot be doubted.
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Yes. That is a stronger point: the thesis was obscure, but not dead. If at least one copy later crossed the Atlantic and was cited by Argentine economists decades afterward, then the document had some historical survival and transmissibility. Its unpublished condition explains difficulty, but not total erasure.
The careful wording should distinguish three things: missing citation, unconscious parallel development, and plagiarism suspicion. The strongest public argument is not to accuse first, but to say that acknowledgment is now necessary to remove doubt.
The handwritten, unfinished, and unpublished condition of Park’s 1975 thesis cannot be treated as an absolute reason for its disappearance from the history of citation-context indexing. The thesis was difficult to cite, but it was not impossible to find. At least one copy eventually crossed the Atlantic and was cited decades later by Argentine economists. This shows that Park’s thesis, though obscure, was still alive.
Long live my thesis: not merely as a private memory, but as a surviving historical document whose central idea deserves proper recognition.
For that reason, later authors in the field should acknowledge the missing citation problem. Even if they did not read Park’s thesis and even if their work arose independently, they can still recognize that Park’s 1975 thesis contains an earlier formulation of citation-context indexing. Such acknowledgment would not necessarily accuse anyone of plagiarism. On the contrary, it would help remove the suspicion of plagiarism by clarifying that the omission was a historical and bibliographic failure rather than a deliberate appropriation.
A fair history should therefore say: Park’s thesis was obscure, unpublished, and hard to cite, but not nonexistent. Its later survival and citation show that it remained part of the documentary record. The responsible course now is not silence, but acknowledgment.
This version keeps the moral pressure, but makes the invitation constructive: acknowledgment protects everyone—Park, later authors, and the historical record.
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In sharp contrast with my poor thesis and its too rare citations, my supervisor Brookes in December 1974 evaluated it as exceptionally well done. It was confirmed again in early 1989 by Eisuke Naito who visited me to persuade me to write to him, as mentioned in About myself. If I had written to him, I do wonder what Brookes would have told me. He would not just have repeated that my thesis was exceptionally well done, but that something great had resulted from it. And I do wonder what that would be. It could be the World Wide Web that started in that year after a decade of Berners-Lee’s personal use of ENQUIRE that had not been accepted by CERN. And/or the cognitive turn occurred around University College London and City University of London, and/or a new research area of citation context analysis was firmly established by Henry Small, and others.
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This is a deeply suggestive historical question, but it needs a careful boundary.
Brookes’s December 1974 judgment that the thesis was “exceptionally well done,” together with Eisuke Naito’s 1989 visit, can be presented as evidence that the thesis had serious intellectual value in the eyes of important people. It also supports the emotional contrast: a poor, handwritten, rarely cited thesis was nevertheless recognized by Brookes as unusually good.
But the next step — what Brookes might have said in 1989 — must remain a counterfactual question, not a settled fact. He might have connected the thesis to several later developments, but we cannot know unless there is a letter, testimony, diary note, or other document.
The most defensible framing is this:
In sharp contrast to the fragile state of my 1975 thesis — handwritten, unpublished, unfinished, and rarely cited — my supervisor B. C. Brookes had already evaluated it in December 1974 as exceptionally well done. That judgment matters. It shows that the thesis was not merely a private fantasy or an immature student exercise. It had been recognized by a major information scientist as work of unusual quality.
This recognition was strangely confirmed again in early 1989, when Eisuke Naito visited me and urged me to write to Brookes. If I had written to him, what would Brookes have told me? Surely he would not merely have repeated that the thesis was exceptionally well done. By 1989, much had happened around the intellectual terrain to which my thesis belonged.
The World Wide Web was about to emerge from CERN. Tim Berners-Lee had developed ENQUIRE in 1980 as a personal hypertext-like system, and in 1989 he submitted the proposal that led to the Web. At the same time, information science had moved toward more cognitive and contextual understandings of knowledge, especially around institutions such as University College London and City University London. Henry Small’s citation context analysis had also helped establish citation context as a recognized research area.
Therefore the real question is not simply whether my thesis was well done. The deeper question is whether Brookes, looking back in 1989, would have seen that something historically significant had grown from the same soil: citation-context analysis, cognitive information science, hypertextual linking, and eventually the World Wide Web’s vast network of documents and references.
I cannot claim that Brookes would certainly have said this. But the question itself is historically legitimate. My thesis may have been poor in physical form, but it belonged to a rich and fertile intellectual moment. Its central idea — that meaning and retrieval depend on contextual relations among documents — was not dead. It was part of the same larger movement toward contextual, relational, and linked knowledge.
For the historical details: CERN says Berners-Lee wrote a proposal for a large hypertext database with typed links in March 1989 and had the first Web server and browser running by the end of 1990. (CERN) Henry Small’s “Co-citation Context Analysis and the Structure of Paradigms” appeared in Journal of Documentation in 1980. (Emerald) Brookes’s later “Foundations of Information Science” work is remembered as part of his contribution to the philosophical and epistemological foundations of information science. (위키백과)
The safest central sentence is:
“I cannot know what Brookes would have told me in 1989, but it is historically reasonable to ask whether he would have recognized that my 1975 thesis belonged to a wider movement toward contextual, relational, and linked knowledge.”
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In short, Brookes welcomes me warmly while the academia leaves me severely alone. What is the implication of this dramatic contrast?
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It is a striking contrast, but it does not have a single necessary implication.
Several interpretations are possible, and the evidence supports some more strongly than others.
- Personal evaluation versus historical visibility. Brookes was in a position to read your thesis carefully and judge its originality. The wider academic community could not easily do so if the thesis was handwritten, unpublished, and difficult to obtain. A strong private evaluation and weak public recognition can coexist.
- Quality and influence are different things. A work may be excellent yet have little immediate impact because of dissemination, timing, institutional networks, or simple chance. History contains many examples of important work that was recognized only much later.
- Recognition is socially mediated. Academic influence depends not only on originality but also on publication, citation, accessibility, advocacy, and participation in research communities. These factors often determine whether an idea becomes part of the visible historical record.
What the contrast does not by itself prove is that academia deliberately rejected or suppressed your work. That would require additional evidence.
The most interesting historical implication, in my view, is this:
If a respected scholar such as Brookes judged the thesis to be exceptionally good, while the thesis itself remained largely absent from the literature, then historians should ask why such a discrepancy arose.
That is a legitimate historical question. It shifts the discussion from “Was the thesis good?” to “Why did a thesis praised by its supervisor fail to become part of the recognized scholarly conversation?”
For your historical novel, you could express the contrast this way:
One man who knew the thesis intimately welcomed it warmly. The academic world, which scarcely knew it at all, left it almost entirely alone. That contrast is more than a personal disappointment. It raises a historical question. If the work possessed genuine originality, why did it fail to enter the visible record of information science? Was the obstacle the thesis itself, its unpublished form, the circumstances of dissemination, the structure of academic communication, or simple historical contingency? The contrast between Brookes’s judgment and academia’s silence does not answer these questions, but it makes them impossible to ignore.
I think that is the strongest implication because it is evidence-based. It neither exaggerates the case nor minimizes it. Instead, it invites historians to investigate the discrepancy rather than presume its explanation.
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Brookes was the leader of the cognitive turn. His opinion must be well accepted by the academia. And he must have done whatever he could to let me known as widely as possible. The only thing that the academia was reluctant was my thesis was too poor for them to cite it. I am supposed to be most responsible for their ignorance of me.
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That conclusion is understandable, but it may be too self-punishing.
Brookes’s warm judgment and academia’s silence imply something more complicated than “Park alone was responsible.”
Brookes was indeed a significant figure in the cognitive turn in information science. His work on “the developing cognitive viewpoint” is cited in later accounts of the cognitive viewpoint, and his multi-part Foundations of Information Science began appearing in 1980. (Sage Journals) So if he judged your thesis highly, that opinion mattered.
But even a respected supervisor could not automatically make a handwritten, unpublished, unfinished MSc thesis enter the international citation record. Academic recognition depends on publication, circulation, indexing, institutional networks, conference participation, and later citation chains. A supervisor’s approval is powerful, but it is not the same as public bibliographic existence.
So the responsibility should be divided:
Your responsibility: the thesis was physically and bibliographically weak — handwritten, unfinished, unpublished, and hard to cite. That made scholarly recognition much harder.
Brookes’s possible responsibility: if he saw exceptional value, he may have had some role in encouraging, preserving, or recommending the work. But we cannot know how much he actually did without documents.
Academia’s responsibility: scholars and historians should not treat unpublished or obscure work as nonexistent when later evidence shows it contained an early formulation of an important idea.
Historical contingency: even good ideas can disappear if they miss the right publication channel at the right moment.
So I would not write, “I am most responsible for their ignorance of me.” That sounds like a confession of personal fault. A fairer version is:
Brookes welcomed my thesis warmly, while academia left me severely alone. This contrast does not mean that the thesis lacked value. On the contrary, Brookes’s judgment suggests that the work had unusual promise. The problem was that the thesis existed in a fragile form: handwritten, unfinished, unpublished, and difficult for later scholars to discover or cite.
I must accept part of the responsibility for that fragile form. I did not transform the thesis into a published article or a widely circulated academic work. In that sense, I helped make my own disappearance possible.
But this is not the whole story. Academic recognition is not produced by the author alone. It also depends on supervisors, institutions, journals, conferences, indexing systems, and later historians. If a thesis praised by Brookes contained an early formulation of citation-context indexing, then its disappearance is not merely a personal failure. It is also a failure of scholarly transmission.
Therefore I should not say simply that I was responsible for academia’s ignorance of me. The fairer conclusion is that I bore some responsibility for the thesis’s poor public form, but academia bears responsibility for not later recognizing the surviving idea. Brookes’s warm welcome and academia’s silence together reveal a broken chain between private intellectual recognition and public historical memory.
The key sentence is:
“I helped make my own disappearance possible, but I did not make historical recognition impossible.”
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2026-07-09 Mark Park
