The presentation that I saw yesterday clearly did not cite primary sources. The general tone seemed to be “I read about this somewhere, and that got me thinking.”
Unfortunately, this thinking led the author to largely duplicate existing foundational work from more than forty years ago. I blame the reviewers as much as I blame him, since those sorts of errors should be caught by the review process.
When I spoke with him afterward, I described the original foundational work that he had managed to replicate. He replied “All of that work was from before I was born.”
I then told him “Isaac Newton’s work was also from before you were born.” I can’t be sure, but I think he got the point.
One problem here is that if you write a paper that just cites whatever secondary source you happened to read, and the next person does the same, and so on, then the actual foundational work that you could build upon gets lost, fading away into the mists of time.
And then rather than science advancing, it just starts to go around in circles, with people “re-inventing” the same things over and over. Newton knew what he was talking about when he said “If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants.”
Citing original sources is not just a nicety. It’s the only way that science can be effective.