At University College London, during 1973-1974, I studied for MSc degree in information science. I was supervised by B. C. Brookes, through whom I submitted a hand-written copy of my thesis titled “A Direct Approach to Information Retrieval” in November 1974. It lacked References. He returned it in December, acknowledging it is exceptionally well done. Its core is to build up a citation-context index (CCI) or citation-context database (CCD) that aims to help scholars perform academic citation tracking (ACT) and catch the core rather than the subject of the cited documents.
This is the very principle that was automated in 1998 by Steve Lawrence, C. Lee Giles, and Kurt Bollacker of NEC Research Institute, now NEC Labs. They named it CiteSeer, now CiteSeerX. It was granted a United States Patent No. 6,289,342, titled “Autonomous citation indexing and literature browsing using citation context.” As suggested by the title, the patent was not granted for the principle but an automation method. If it had been granted for the principle as well, Google Scholar, Microsoft Academic, and the like could not have appeared. Why not for the principle? It may be most likely that the authors knew I invented it in my thesis and that no one of them had reviously studied about that. I am not raising the question of plagiarism. To the contrary, I am so pleased that my principle was realized. In this regard, I’d like to introduce you to my prefatory quotation:
“In science men have learned consciously to subordinate themselves to a common purpose without losing the individuality of their achievements. Each one knows that his work depends on that of his predecessors and colleagues, and that it can only reach its fruition through the work of his successors.”– J. D. Bernal, The Social Function of Science
Nevertheless, your authors did not cite my thesis, and people still wonder the possibility of plagiarism. They also wonder why CiteSeer was strangely transferred to Penn State University, and even why Penn State recently stopped the financial support. I do wish it to be continued anyway. All this state of affairs may damage the honor of your esteemed institution, I fear. It remains a historical mystery to be exposed anytime. It appears in shackles. You’d need a definite breakthrough to free yourself from them for ever. And I have a proposal in which you may be interested.
By the way, be advised that I argued for cognitive contextualism in detail on which ACT using CCD be founded. This argument is supposed to lead to the cognitive turn or cognitive pardigm shift in information science since the late 1970s, centering around UCL, led by Brookes. This is compared with what I call attentive contextualism in LLM since Ashish Vaswani, et al. (2017) “Attention is All You Need.” I rephrase this as “Attention to Context is All You Need” as a motto of integral contextualism. With this, both IR and LLM appear to get closer. Both may be complementary.
As coined by the English jurist William Blackstone in the 1760s, Blackstone’s formulation reads: “It is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer.” And I am supposed to be the very one innocent suffering. I don’t know why my MSc degree was cancelled. This must be done by those who are too afraid of my coming out.
