This article interacted with a few other thoughts to inspire me to post something. I found it interesting that it was put in terms of women over-citing, rather than in terms of men, especially senior people in their field, under-citing, because I think the latter way of describing things would be more accurate. Our modern citation practices are a huge aid in locating errors. Ancient history is a hobby of mine, and of course one of the biggest problems in knowing what's going on in pre-modern events is that prior to the modern period (really, prior to Gibbon), the practice was to virtually never mention one's sources. Thus, while many ancient sources no doubt describe what they thought happened (not that there weren't deliberate frauds, but they were surely in the minority), it's rarely possible to distinguish what they might have seen themselves, what they were told by multiple, reliable sources, what they were told by few, unreliable sources, and what they constructed using plausible guesswork based on clues surrounding the event. And even the sources who are most reliable themselves were not necessarily equally reliable in deciding who else to trust, and of course their biases could influence their guesswork. Thus, nearly all ancient sources need to be treated with considerable skepticism. Fortunately, modern historical practices track this; modern historians use mountains of citations, so it's easier to tell how strong the evidence for a particular claim is. Further, if some new evidence, perhaps a new archaeological find, definitively shows that some ancient account or other was more or less reliable than previously believed, it's relatively easy to figure out when modern historians were relying on that account.
It's still important in modern times and in other fields, though. To take an example from philosophy that I'm very familiar with, Nietzsche's citation practices were horrible. Fortunately, since he is a modern figure, we know much more about him and about the sources that were available to him than was the case with the ancients, and so it's possible to use that to better assess some of his claims, but that really isn't an ideal substitute. Consider his use of etymology and claims about language generally. Nietzsche was a brilliant classical philologist. His claims about Greek and Latin seem to be nearly always true; even when he disagreed with his contemporaries, or expressed an opinion on a matter where there was no established view, more recent work more often than not has come around to something close to what Nietzsche thought. But he talks about languages other than Greek and Latin, and his claims about other languages are much less reliable. It seems clear that he got them from his various colleagues, philologists working on other languages, and they were generally not as brilliant as he was, and anyway he may have misremembered ideas which he might well have just gotten in conversation. But it's a problem that you need to know so much about Nietzsche to know how to evaluate his claims about languages; you shouldn't have to know the biography of every author you read. And knowing that Nietzsche is unreliable concerning languages other than Greek and Latin still doesn't help you evaluate individual claims he makes about, say, sanskrit, or the "Ural-Altaic"[1] languages. Had he mentioned what his sources were on such claims, it would be easier to evaluate their accuracy (and, indeed, had he gone back to consult the sources himself again, he might have discovered some errors where he just misremembered things, or noticed that his source wasn't very confident about one of the claims he wanted to cite).
There are many other cases where Nietzsche's lack of careful citation makes his work more confusing and difficult to interpret than it needs to be; he mentions Paul Ree explicitly once in a while, but someone who doesn't know Nietzsche's biography well is unlikely to realize how frequently Nietzsche's references to English psychologists or English philosophers are filtered through Ree, who was a huge Anglophile and a close friend and major influence of Nietzsche's. When Nietzsche attributes something to English philosophers that doesn't seem to fit any of the famous ones, it's usually something Ree believed (and perhaps interepreted some of his English sources as supporting). Similarly, it is normal to dismiss Nietzsche's comments about women (and they are eminently dismissable, for the most part), but anyone speculating about why he says what he does about women, and how it relates to the rest of his philosophy, should probably be aware of Lou Salome's theories on the subject of women. Salome influenced Nietzsche's views on the subject of women not merely by being a woman he knew well (as most scholars are aware), but also by being a theorist on the subject he considered insightful (a fact fewer seem to have recognized, no doubt partly because so few read Salome these days).
[1] One of the mistakes Nietzsche copied from his philologist friends; in Nietzsche's time, scholars thought what they called the "Ural-Altaic" languages constituted a fairly closely related family. Modern linguists do not generally think the Uralic languages are closely related to most of the Altaic languages, and there is apparently some skepticism about how closely the Altaic languages are related to one another.
