Revolution in references: give readers a chance by putting page numbers
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In On the Origin of Species, Charles Darwin observed that Malthus's doctrine applied to the animal and vegetable kingdoms. I am a lawyer who recently published a book that required me to
analyse hundreds of scientific books (including Darwin's Origin), book chapters and articles. In nearly all, a citation to this fact would read this way: “Darwin, C. (1859). On the Origin of
Species. London: John Murray”. Unless readers sleuthed through the entire 490-page book, they would have had to take my word for what Darwin said. The problem was nearly as bad for
citations to articles. Standard scientific notation does not appear to require page references for citations, though sometimes quotations get them.
The Editor replies — Nature now requires authors citing a section of a stand-alone text (for example a book or thesis) to provide the number(s) of the cited pages. Authors need not provide
numbers for cited pages within papers and other articles, although they should continue, as now, to provide the first and last page numbers of the whole article.
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