The one sided answers neglect the complexity of the issue. First of all most of the papers in the science are nowdays difficult to judge, survey and check for an average reader, not to mention the users like science agencies and general public. The production is huge, there is lots of repetition and formalism differences make it difficult to bring knowledge and fruitfulness to the public and we need to fight this not by messy inclusion of everything but by making honest and informative choices to the reader. So, the main criterion is to write primarily for the reader and the author should have the stand weather the article she cites are likely to be useful to reader or not at all; if one does not take reader as the main criterion but some agenda of pushing the agenda for agencies, why would then the reader respect author's agenda of misleading the reader which reference is good and readable just to fulfill the political agenda ? In mathematics, the pointers from the text to the bibliography, together with the basic standard knowledge in the field should make obvious path how to achieve the results in the paper. This is already a difficult goal and making references only by history and not lead by self-analysis of the paper and its predecessors will make it too difficult to reconstruct the preliminaries used. Of course, one needs to account for balance in making clear what the original resources are either by making clear pointers to other surveys and also citing directly relevant and used work with some emphasis on the "primary" sources, where the latter term is not fully well defined, as each idea has some predecessors.

I disagree with much of the answer and comments of Deane Young, who is on one hand saying cite generously much, cite when in doubt etc. as if we live in an ideal world where the size of bibliography is allowed to be as large as you want, (Example: One of my papers was delayed for 2 years because it was 19 pages and the limit in the journal was 17. Roughly, two pages where bibliography.) and on the other hand saying that we live in a bad world where people depend on our citations, so cite even if you did not read/check and where we need to adapt to "funding agencies". Well, if we all adapt to present treand in funding agencies we agree with a wrong attitude that the citation is proportional to research credit what is not true: often the most cited are often surveys and books, popular digests, and also some original papers which are often only famous but nobody reads, or can read (so many times they are more readable than the public thinks, by inertion). It is better to push the agencies to take this into account and fund according to the full description of the discoveries of the author and description of their impact by listing consequences and new directions opened, and not of numerical quasi-impact. Conforming to numerical quasi-impact as a main principle may exactly push down honest people who cite only papers they trust, they check, they believe the authors and so on, we may also cite references which are written in bad way and not recommendable to the reader. To extend this remark to extreme which appears in practice, I know many people who cite famous people just to show that their own work is relevant for the trends pushed by those. This is the worst kind of citation.

There is also a pressure from referees and editors to include the references of their choice. In such cases one has to follow common sense, and decide if the request is reasonable, even with expense of possibly changing the journal. We should not regret the referees' and editor's time if they abuse their position to make people cite papers of their friends and their own; however we should appreciate it in good cases when their knowledge is channeled to point to the sources we did not use or appreciate and to learn what is the better or more original reference in many cases.