taillessmonkey

<a href="http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99993168" target="_blank">Scientists don't read what they cite, study says.</a>

"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 scientists who ran the study] 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.....Simkin and Roychowdhury promise that between them they read all the references listed in their own paper including a book by Sigmund Freud. Their advice to other scientists is 'read before you cite'."


I gotta admit, this article irks me a bit. Having read the interview (and not actually the study ), this doesn't look like a "clever" way to show scientists aren't reading what they cite at all. They don't appear to have done any research showing a correlation of any sort between copying a citation from someone else's paper and not reading the original work. I've also got to admit that sometimes when creating a references section for a paper, I've been too lazy to go look up the proper way to cite. I've looked up someone else's paper online, and just copied their citation *FOR A PAPER THAT I'VE READ* into my references. This study appears to contain the blatantly flawed assumption that whenever a citation is copied, the corresponding paper is not read. As their advice to me is "read before you cite," mine to them would be "don't claim existence of a correlation and provide unrelated evidence to support it."
Any comments?

-tail

Undercurrent

I don't particulrily doubt it. When I was writing my thesis, I ran into a lot of citations of a particular paper that was written in the 1930s and it was always cited as [Whatshisname, 193x] in the bibliography when other paper's were given a full reference by title/journal/&c. (my memory isn't good enough to remember the name and exact year, but you get the picture).

I specifically went down to the library to look it up on microfiche and got a copy of the paper, which was nearly impossible to find and was written in German. I would be suprised to find out that every one of the citers of it had spent the effort to look it up and translate it.

I don't think that it is terribly bad form to cite like that, though. The derivation in the paper (it was the first time it was realized that the Shrocinger Equation for a Coulomb field separates in parabolic, as well as the traditional spherical coordinates) has become so widely known that it has been republished in myriad text books, and the citing of the original paper is not really an indication of where you should look for this result, so much as making sure credit is given to the guy who thought of it first.

m.

One of the last sane

And did you notice that all the people citing the German paper, by some miracle, used the same translator?! I ran into an interesting example of that one time.

Another observation: when I was writing some papers on a subject, I traced back some 25 years to an original paper, and noticed a strange trend in citation over time. The 5 years old or less papers that cited it said things like "The work of Smith in 19XX clearly established that..." The 5-10 year old papers citing it said "The work of Smith in 19XX is strong evidence that...". The 10 -15 year old papers citing it said "The work of Smith (19XX) supports the theory that...".The 15-20 year old papers citing it said things like "The work of Smith (19XX) may be evidence that...", while Smith (not his real name) wrote, in the original, things like "One possible explanation for this is..." with riders like "More research in this area is required". As it turned out there was very little "more research", just repeated cites that become more and more enthusiastic and emphatic about Smith's work. When I read Smith's paper myself, I was unimpressed with the evidence, which I thought was shaky for the time it was written and really shaky a quarter of a century later. (But at least Smith was modest about it.)

[ December 17, 2002: Message edited by: One of the last sane ]</p>

Tim Thompson

You can download the original paper here (PDF format only).

<a href="http://cul.arXiv.org/abs/cond-mat/0212043" target="_blank">Read before you cite!</a>
M.V. Simkin & V.P. Roychowdhury (UCLA)
Abstract: We report a method of estimating what percentage of people who cited a paper had actually read it. The method is based on a stochastic modeling of the citation process that explains empirical studies of misprint distributions in citations (which we show follows a <a href="http://www.nist.gov/dads/HTML/zipfslaw.html" target="_blank">Zipf law</a>). Our estimate is only about 20% of citers read the original.

Late_Cretaceous

I can't remember where this originated from. No doubt many of you have seen it before.

"IT HAS LONG BEEN KNOWN"... I didn't look up the original reference.
"A DEFINITE TREND IS EVIDENT"... These data are practically meaningless.

"WHILE IT HAS NOT BEEN POSSIBLE TOPROVIDE DEFINITE ANSWERS TO THESE QUESTIONS"... An unsuccessful experiment, but I still hope to get it published.

"THREE OF THE SAMPLES WERE CHOSEN FOR DETAILED STUDY"... The
results of the others did not make any sense.

"TYPICAL RESULTS ARE SHOWN"... This is the prettiest graph.

"THESE RESULTS WILL BE IN A SUBSEQUENT REPORT"... I might get around to
this sometime, if pushed/funded.

"THE MOST RELIABLE RESULTS ARE OBTAINED BY JONES"... He was
my graduate student; his grade depended on this.

"IN MYEXPERIENCE"... Once.
"IN CASE AFTER CASE"... Twice.
"IN A SERIES OF CASES".. Thrice.
"IT IS BELIEVED THAT"... I think.
"IT IS GENERALLY BELIEVED THAT"... A couple of other guys think so too.

"CORRECT WITHIN AN ORDER OF MAGNITUDE"... Wrong.

"ACCORDING TO STATISTICAL ANALYSIS"... Rumor has it.

"A STATISTICALLY ORIENTED PROJECTION OF THE SIGNIFICANCE OF
THESE FINDINGS"... A wild guess.

"A CAREFUL ANALYSIS OF OBTAINABLE DATA"... Three pages of notes were obliterated whenI knocked over a glass of beer.

"IT IS CLEAR THAT MUCH ADDITIONAL WORK WILL BE REQUIRED BEFORE A COMPLETE UNDERSTANDING OF THIS PHENOMENA OCCURS"... I don't understand it.

"AFTER ADDITIONAL STUDY BY MY COLLEAGUES".. They don't understand it either.

"THANKS ARE DUE TO JOE BLOTZ FOR ASSISTANCE WITH THE EXPERIMENT AND TO ANDREA SCHAEFFER FOR VALUABLE DISCUSSIONS" ... Mr. Blotz did the work and Ms.Schaeffer explained to me what it meant.

"A HIGHLY SIGNIFICANT AREA FOR EXPLORATORY STUDY"... A totally useless topic selected by my committee.

"IT IS HOPED THAT THIS STUDY WILL STIMULATE FURTHER INVESTIGATION IN THIS FIELD"... I quit.

Valentine Pontifex

One runs into this sort of thing a lot when one looks up quotes used by creationists.