AbstractThe motivation for our research is the view, widespread among Polish scientists, that under the Communist Party’s rule it was always necessary to refer to Marx, Engels, Lenin or Stalin (we call them ‘classics’), especially in the highly-politicised fields like humanities and social sciences, in order for the work to pass the censorship procedures and be published. Therefore, in this paper, we aim to determine whether the 'classics' were commonly cited in a formally socialist country under the rule of the Communist Party (Polish Workers' Party/Polish United Workers’ Party). To address the main research question, we use the Citation Index of the History of Polish Media that covers all publications, whether scholarly articles or book publications, on the history of Polish media; in total, 6880 publications and 59,827 citations from the 1945‒2009 period. We found that citations of the works of the ‘classics’ (N = 296) constitute 0.49% of all citations in the database used and that the practice of citing the 'classics' was extremely rare (just 64 occurrences in the analysed sample). Our research also contributes to the development of reflection in historical bibliometrics and argues that bibliographical databases need to cover various types of publications, especially scholarly book publications, written in different languages (not only in English).