blivet radio
The Radio weblog of Hal Rager

Sunday, December 15, 2002

A recurring problem Scientists exposed as sloppy reporters. - "A cunning statistical study has exposed scientists as sloppy reporters. When they write up their work and cite other people's papers, most do not bother to read the original." "The discovery was made by Mikhail Simkin and Vwani Roychowdhury of the University of California, Los Angeles, who study the way information spreads around different kinds of networks." "They noticed in a citation database that misprints in references are fairly common, and that a lot of the mistakes are identical. This suggests that many scientists take short cuts, simply copying a reference from someone else's paper rather than reading the original source. (from The New Scientist via Freedom to Tinker) LS Thoughts - I wonder what the librarians responsibility is here. Obviously we can't verify every cite that appears in every journal, but we can educate researchers on the perils of mis-citing works, let alone the importance of reading those works. Do they not read the research because they just don't have the time or os it because they don't have access to the material. If the latter were true, education is the next step. How many of these researchers know about interlibrary loan or direct access? [Library Stuff] You get 'read and use original souce material!' hammered into you during grad school, still, too few do it once they are out. I won't even start on those that think their data is the only credible source. 2:09:25 PM    comment   trackback []