5 ms·

The Future of Academic Style: Why Citations Still Matter in the Age of Google

48 points by diodorus 11y ago

nailer 11y ago
The amount of supposedly technical people who 'cite wikipedia' - something wikipedia itself advises against - is astounding. It would help for wikipedia to let users pick a style and provide a citation UI, giving users copypasta to cite the real sources for any given section of text.
- a_imho 11y ago
  Indirection is the least of my concerns using wikipedia citations. More often than not the cited sources are down or paywalled, in some cases the editor using the context is just plain wrong (without assuming agenda or bias cherrypicking) about the implications, or the sources are changed retroactively.
NoGravitas 11y ago
IMO the biggest problem with modern citations are unstable URLs. The best you can do for a lot of sources is to cite the URL, and the date and time it was retrieved on. Then all future readers can do is either hope the resource pointed to by the URL has remained stable, or is in archive.org. And don't get me started on SPAs. Google Books goes out of its way to provide citable URLs, but it's very easy to envision a similar service that doesn't.
- mwest 11y ago
  In academia this is something that DOIs (see https://www.datacite.org/ https://www.datacite.org/) solve quite neatly.
  - IanCal 11y ago
    DOIs don't solve mutable content, do they? They help solve problems around ambiguity, but there's nothing inherent in DOIs that stops you from updating/removing the content behind the scenes. I think the only way it helps the problem is that if you're abusing it you'll have the ability to mint DOIs revoked.
    - 100ideas 11y ago
      Do content libraries that provide DOIs, such as MIT's DSPACE, at least promise that the content is immutable? http://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/44962/BBFRFC20.pdf?sequence=1 http://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/44962/BBFRFC20... It would be cool if the DOI was hashed to content. But I think immutability is part social contract of the DOI - the DOI never changes and neither does the document. New document, new DOI.
      - dalke 11y ago
        No. Nor can they. Here's an example. I recently found a mistake in an ACS (American Chemical Society) journal. The ACS has gone back and assigned a DOI even to print publications from decades ago. Even each letter to the editor was assigned it own DOI. I found an example where there were two letters to the editor on the bottom half of the same page. It wasn't easy to tell where the first ended and the second started. The indexer created one record, gave it a unique DOI, and used the title of the first letter and the author of the second article. What does "immutable" mean for this case? Does the DOI really refer (in some immutable way) to the first record? The second record? Or the aggregate? They resolved the problem by correcting the record so it had the author for the first letter to the editor, then creating a new DOI for the second letter to the editor. That seems the most reasonable. And in this case the content - an image of the page - was unchanged because both letters were on the same page. But had the content been limited to only the letter(s), or the second letter spilled over to the next page, this fix would have changed the content. In general, some paper scans are of mediocre quality. (Not of this journal though.) Here's one from DSpace which I would like to have at a higher resolution - http://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/12664/28627690-MIT.pdf?sequence=2 http://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/12664/28627690... . I can well believe that 10 years from now there may be a rescan with higher quality. "Immutable" doesn't make sense in that context, does it?
        NoGravitas 11y ago
        > I can well believe that 10 years from now there may be a rescan with higher quality. "Immutable" doesn't make sense in that context, does it? I see your point, but for future research purposes, it may be highly relevant to know that what someone cited in an influential paper 20 years ago they got from a low-quality scan. At least in the humanities, that's actually the kind of thing that some researchers care about a lot.
pducks32 11y ago
Couldn't a hash work for immutability? Like an md5 hash of the text?

48 points by diodorus 11y ago

The amount of supposedly technical people who 'cite wikipedia' - something wikipedia itself advises against - is astounding. It would help for wikipedia to let users pick a style and provide a citation UI, giving users copypasta to cite the real sources for any given section of text.

a_imho 11y ago
Indirection is the least of my concerns using wikipedia citations. More often than not the cited sources are down or paywalled, in some cases the editor using the context is just plain wrong (without assuming agenda or bias cherrypicking) about the implications, or the sources are changed retroactively.

NoGravitas 11y ago

IMO the biggest problem with modern citations are unstable URLs. The best you can do for a lot of sources is to cite the URL, and the date and time it was retrieved on. Then all future readers can do is either hope the resource pointed to by the URL has remained stable, or is in archive.org. And don't get me started on SPAs. Google Books goes out of its way to provide citable URLs, but it's very easy to envision a similar service that doesn't.

mwest 11y ago
In academia this is something that DOIs (see https://www.datacite.org/ https://www.datacite.org/) solve quite neatly.
- IanCal 11y ago
  DOIs don't solve mutable content, do they? They help solve problems around ambiguity, but there's nothing inherent in DOIs that stops you from updating/removing the content behind the scenes. I think the only way it helps the problem is that if you're abusing it you'll have the ability to mint DOIs revoked.
  - 100ideas 11y ago
    Do content libraries that provide DOIs, such as MIT's DSPACE, at least promise that the content is immutable? http://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/44962/BBFRFC20.pdf?sequence=1 http://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/44962/BBFRFC20... It would be cool if the DOI was hashed to content. But I think immutability is part social contract of the DOI - the DOI never changes and neither does the document. New document, new DOI.
    - dalke 11y ago
      No. Nor can they. Here's an example. I recently found a mistake in an ACS (American Chemical Society) journal. The ACS has gone back and assigned a DOI even to print publications from decades ago. Even each letter to the editor was assigned it own DOI. I found an example where there were two letters to the editor on the bottom half of the same page. It wasn't easy to tell where the first ended and the second started. The indexer created one record, gave it a unique DOI, and used the title of the first letter and the author of the second article. What does "immutable" mean for this case? Does the DOI really refer (in some immutable way) to the first record? The second record? Or the aggregate? They resolved the problem by correcting the record so it had the author for the first letter to the editor, then creating a new DOI for the second letter to the editor. That seems the most reasonable. And in this case the content - an image of the page - was unchanged because both letters were on the same page. But had the content been limited to only the letter(s), or the second letter spilled over to the next page, this fix would have changed the content. In general, some paper scans are of mediocre quality. (Not of this journal though.) Here's one from DSpace which I would like to have at a higher resolution - http://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/12664/28627690-MIT.pdf?sequence=2 http://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/12664/28627690... . I can well believe that 10 years from now there may be a rescan with higher quality. "Immutable" doesn't make sense in that context, does it?
      - NoGravitas 11y ago
        > I can well believe that 10 years from now there may be a rescan with higher quality. "Immutable" doesn't make sense in that context, does it? I see your point, but for future research purposes, it may be highly relevant to know that what someone cited in an influential paper 20 years ago they got from a low-quality scan. At least in the humanities, that's actually the kind of thing that some researchers care about a lot.

pducks32 11y ago

Couldn't a hash work for immutability? Like an md5 hash of the text?