I pose this question because it recently came up for a colleague who got some pushback after citing another colleague as a "personal communication", regarding field observations of a rare species at a particular locality. The researcher who was cited did not seem to have a problem with the information associated with the citation, but insisted that "permission should have been obtained". My impression based on my own experience is that this is an unorthodox criticism, and one that I had not encountered, but maybe I'd missed something that others were aware of in terms of authorship etiquette. Any thoughts?

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