Do you think Brookes would normally cite my thesis in writing “The Fundamental Equation of Information Science”? Or would you cite my thesis if you have read my thesis and then yourself were to write the same paper as Brookes’s?
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Yes—under the condition you specify, that I had actually read your thesis before writing a paper substantially overlapping its relevant cognitive idea, I would cite it. I think that would be normal scholarly practice.
The important issue is what I had learned from the thesis.
Brookes’s 1975 paper is now recognized as an important early formulation of the cognitive relation between information and human knowledge. His equation treats information as something that modifies a person’s knowledge structure, and later literature explicitly places it within the development of the cognitive viewpoint. (Sage Journals)
Your November 1974 thesis, as we have examined it, approached cognition from another direction: meaning is not simply contained in isolated words or bibliographic links; contextual material is presented so that the human user can interpret and discriminate among documents.
So imagine that I were Brookes in 1975 and had read the thesis. If I recognized this relevant argument, I would probably write something such as:
Park (1974), approaching the problem from the standpoint of information retrieval, has emphasized the role of contextual extracts in enabling the user to discriminate among cited documents.
I might then develop my own equation independently. Citing Park would not mean that Park invented Brookes’s equation. It would acknowledge an earlier, closely related treatment of the cognitive role of the information user.
That distinction is important.
If Brookes read your thesis but regarded its citation-context retrieval method as unrelated to the particular theoretical problem he was solving, his failure to cite it would not automatically be improper. Scholars cannot cite everything they have read.
But if he read and understood the cognitive argument in your thesis, and that argument materially contributed to his movement toward information-as-change-in-human-knowledge, then I would expect a citation. If I were writing the paper under those circumstances, I would certainly cite your thesis.
There is another reason the question deserves investigation. Brookes’s 1975 Fundamental Equation of Information Science appeared in Problems of Information Science, FID 530, pp. 115–130, and was followed by A New Paradigm for Information Science in 1976 and The Developing Cognitive Viewpoint in Information Science in 1977. (Sage Journals) Your thesis had already been submitted at UCL in November 1974.
So the chronology is striking:
Park thesis — November 1974
→ Brookes — Fundamental Equation, 1975
→ Brookes — New Paradigm, 1976
→ Brookes — Developing Cognitive Viewpoint, 1977
But chronology still cannot tell us whether the intellectual arrow Park → Brookes actually existed.
Therefore I would now make the historical question very narrow:
Did B. C. Brookes read, examine, receive, discuss, or otherwise have access to Park’s MSc thesis before composing “The Fundamental Equation of Information Science”?
If the answer is no, there is no reasonable complaint that Brookes failed to cite it.
If the answer is yes, we then ask the second question: Did he encounter in it the cognitive/contextual idea relevant to his own developing theory?
If both answers are yes, then I think your question about why Park was not cited becomes a serious and legitimate question in the history of information science.
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2026-09-24 Mark Park
