Robert K. Merton Quotes
We thus begin to see that the institutionalized practice of citations and references in the sphere of learning is not a trivial matter. While many a general reader-that is, the lay reader located outside the domain of science and scholarship-may regard the lowly footnote or the remote endnote or the bibliographic parenthesis as a dispensable nuisance, it can be argued that these are in truth central to the incentive system and an underlying sense of distributive justice that do much to energize the advancement of knowledge.
Merton, Robert K. "Foreword." Citation Indexing: Its Theory and Application in Science, Technology, and Humanities, by Eugene Garfield, John Wiley & Sons, 1979, p. viii.
The textbooks in the Egyptian schools and universities would change frequently as the politics of the nation and the world changed. This is typical in nations where ideology changes frequently. There is pressure for textbook change even in America, even over such basic science as evolution or interpretations of history and politics. In Egypt and most other nations even facts change from year to year.
Robert King Merton was an American sociologist who is considered a founding father of modern sociology, and a major contributor to the subfield of criminology. He spent most of his career teaching at Columbia University, where he attained the rank of University Professor. In 1994 he was awarded the National Medal of Science for his contributions to the field and for having founded the sociology of science.
