[4] Much of Watkins's childhood was spent in New York City, and he graduated from Friends Seminary in Manhattan before beginning his career at Harvard University.

[2] Linguists influenced by Watkins during his tenure at Harvard include Ives Goddard, Jay Jasanoff, D. Gary Miller, Michael Silverstein, Alice Harris, H. Craig Melchert, Alan Nussbaum, Brent Vine, Mark Hale, Andrew Garrett, Joshua Katz and Benjamin Fortson.

[7] The "law" as it relates to Proto-Celtic was already observed in 1909 by Rudolf Thurneysen on page 422 (section 683) of his Grammar of Old Irish, but it was Watkins who noticed that the same pattern occurred in the histories of other languages.

[9] How to Kill a Dragon: Aspects of Indo-European Poetics was published on November 16, 1995, through Oxford University Press and attempted to establish a formulaic method of comparative linguistics which exemplified the importance of the poetic formula in order to better trace the development of Indo-European languages by working backwards and identifying patterns from their mother language, Proto-Indo-European.

[11] Watkins expands upon the "dragon-slaying myth" in part two of the text by offering new research into his proposed formula of "HERO SLAY SERPENT",[11] he also attempts to reconstruct an example of Proto-Indo-European through the comparative method of historical linguistics.

Lingua Franca reviewer Marc L'Heureux commented that Watkins also implements historical evidence to favor the development of language such as the relationship between the patron and the poet.

[11] How to Kill a Dragon received favorable acclaim and is now considered to be a definitive text which transformed the study of Indo-European poetics.