> His initial paper on special relativity had no citations, despite the existence of a lot of relevant work by others.
It's important to remember that what we now understand to be special relativity, with its spacetime interpretation, was crafted by others (primarily Minkowski) after the original paper. This is important to remember when reading the original paper -- we might be suffering from perfect hindsight.
But I might have chosen a bad example, because it's true that Einstein tended not to attribute the work of others as much as he should have. Compare to Newton's "standing on the shoulders of giants" remark.
It's important to remember that what we now understand to be special relativity, with its spacetime interpretation, was crafted by others (primarily Minkowski) after the original paper. This is important to remember when reading the original paper -- we might be suffering from perfect hindsight.
But I might have chosen a bad example, because it's true that Einstein tended not to attribute the work of others as much as he should have. Compare to Newton's "standing on the shoulders of giants" remark.