4 ms·

Lost academic papers are more interesting to me, probably because I am an engineer and the papers I want have practical utliity to me. One instance where I got

Lost academic papers are more interesting to me, probably because I am an engineer and the papers I want have practical utliity to me. One instance where I got lucky was tracking down a 1946 conference paper by famous turbulence researcher J. O. Hinze. The conference proceedings were unfortunately never published. After a lot of asking around Shell, where Hinze worked at the time, provided me with a copy. The paper was less interesting than tracking it down was, but still important enough to cite in my dissertation. There's a more well cited paper at the same conference by G. Darrieus that my brother found with similar methods.

RyJones 9y ago
I had a similar experience trying to locate a widely referenced standard - I wrote the standards body to see how too get a copy. No dice. I eventually found a reference to our being replaced by another standard, which is widely available, but the standards body sort of black holed the original. The search was a lot of fun, though!
- RyJones 9y ago
  STANAG 2324, for the interested: cancelled in 1979. I was trying to get a copy in ~2001 from the NATO library. 2324 was defacto replaced by MIL-STD-1913, which may eventually be supplanted by STANAG 4694.
  - btrettel 9y ago
    If you still want the original, might be worth asking the Library of Congress Technical Reports and Standards Unit: https://www.loc.gov/rr/scitech/trs/trsover.html https://www.loc.gov/rr/scitech/trs/trsover.html I've had decent luck finding technical reports there. STANAG is not listed in their partial standards holdings, but that doesn't mean that they don't have anything from the organization.
    - RyJones 9y ago
      I found it in 2012, but by then it didn't matter. Thank you for the pointer, though!
jacquesm 9y ago
Is there a point in citing a paper that readers can not find for themselves?
- gms7777 9y ago
  Purely from principles, one might consider it important to credit people for the ideas that they contributed. From a practical sense, it gives readers a way to find it for themselves -- contact the author that cited it.
  - jacquesm 9y ago
    > Purely from principles, one might consider it important to credit people for the ideas that they contributed. That makes good sense. > From a practical sense, it gives readers a way to find it for themselves -- contact the author that cited it. Right, but in the case of a paper this old the author is most likely dead or extremely hard to reach. Maybe a standard part of any paper citing other papers should be a reference to an archived copy of the papers cited?
- btrettel 9y ago
  This is a fair point. Here's my thinking: Just because a paper is hard to find does not mean that it doesn't have valuable data or ideas. To give an example, I spent a lot of time tracking down Russian papers in my field because I found their theory to be better developed in some areas than the west's. Should I not cite these papers because most people won't be able to find them? I don't think so. What they say is unique. There is no alternative. Instead, I translated the most important papers into English. In a conference paper I'm writing right now I cite quite a few of these papers and I've tried to be extremely specific in their citations, going so far as to include OCLC numbers that I used for interlibrary loan. (Librarians will know what to do with this information.) What's easily found today may not be so easily found in the future. Today, I find that many researchers can't find a paper that's not available online but is available in any decent academic library. It's also possible that a hard to find paper is cited wrong or cited ambiguously, and having the correct, unambiguous citation is all one needs to find the paper. To address papers which are practically impossible to track down, as gms7777 suggested, at least people can contact the author of the paper citing the hard to find paper in this case. (For the Hinze paper, as I recall Shell had a NDA as a condition of downloading the paper from their system, so I can't share that one.)

RyJones 9y ago

I had a similar experience trying to locate a widely referenced standard - I wrote the standards body to see how too get a copy. No dice. I eventually found a reference to our being replaced by another standard, which is widely available, but the standards body sort of black holed the original. The search was a lot of fun, though!

RyJones 9y ago
STANAG 2324, for the interested: cancelled in 1979. I was trying to get a copy in ~2001 from the NATO library. 2324 was defacto replaced by MIL-STD-1913, which may eventually be supplanted by STANAG 4694.
- btrettel 9y ago
  If you still want the original, might be worth asking the Library of Congress Technical Reports and Standards Unit: https://www.loc.gov/rr/scitech/trs/trsover.html https://www.loc.gov/rr/scitech/trs/trsover.html I've had decent luck finding technical reports there. STANAG is not listed in their partial standards holdings, but that doesn't mean that they don't have anything from the organization.
  - RyJones 9y ago
    I found it in 2012, but by then it didn't matter. Thank you for the pointer, though!

jacquesm 9y ago

Is there a point in citing a paper that readers can not find for themselves?

gms7777 9y ago
Purely from principles, one might consider it important to credit people for the ideas that they contributed. From a practical sense, it gives readers a way to find it for themselves -- contact the author that cited it.
- jacquesm 9y ago
  > Purely from principles, one might consider it important to credit people for the ideas that they contributed. That makes good sense. > From a practical sense, it gives readers a way to find it for themselves -- contact the author that cited it. Right, but in the case of a paper this old the author is most likely dead or extremely hard to reach. Maybe a standard part of any paper citing other papers should be a reference to an archived copy of the papers cited?
btrettel 9y ago
This is a fair point. Here's my thinking: Just because a paper is hard to find does not mean that it doesn't have valuable data or ideas. To give an example, I spent a lot of time tracking down Russian papers in my field because I found their theory to be better developed in some areas than the west's. Should I not cite these papers because most people won't be able to find them? I don't think so. What they say is unique. There is no alternative. Instead, I translated the most important papers into English. In a conference paper I'm writing right now I cite quite a few of these papers and I've tried to be extremely specific in their citations, going so far as to include OCLC numbers that I used for interlibrary loan. (Librarians will know what to do with this information.) What's easily found today may not be so easily found in the future. Today, I find that many researchers can't find a paper that's not available online but is available in any decent academic library. It's also possible that a hard to find paper is cited wrong or cited ambiguously, and having the correct, unambiguous citation is all one needs to find the paper. To address papers which are practically impossible to track down, as gms7777 suggested, at least people can contact the author of the paper citing the hard to find paper in this case. (For the Hinze paper, as I recall Shell had a NDA as a condition of downloading the paper from their system, so I can't share that one.)