What are the legal ramifications of citing scientific articles for producing commercial software? I am a sophomore student building some software with friends that are heavily based on various articles about distributed hash tables, networking, and various topological mathematical concepts. Since we do plan to sell it after completion, we are worried about potential legal obligations of citing our sources (from different scientific journals)

If we cite some professor, will they be entitled to all our work, perhaps even lay claim to profits and or have the right to sue for copyright infringement? Obviously, I am not asking for the nitty gritty details, but a general rule of thumb.

Is copying theories from scientific journals a big bad idea. Or is it "public knowledge" kind of and I have nothing to fear.



Summary

Does citing scientific sources for your program entitle the researchers to some intellectual property? Am I legally bound to them as if I were to a Lady Gaga if I used one of her songs in my videos?
The knowledge in the articles is for all to use, what you can't do is to copy text. There is a fine line if the article contains e.g. code listings and you use a fragment, or if you take pseudocode and rewrite it in your favorite programming language, that might be a copyright violation. I very much doubt they'd go after you, in any case.

I'd say that citing the articles is very good practice, somebody (even yourself in a year or so!) trying to understand the code later will thank you.