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When my wife was working on her PhD in linguistics she ran across a highly referenced source that she could not find. She followed the chain of reference and re

When my wife was working on her PhD in linguistics she ran across a highly referenced source that she could not find. She followed the chain of reference and reached out to the author who cited the source the first time. He replied that this citation was a typo in the original article and give her the correct source reference. He said that he was chagrined to have seen this typo cited in scores of papers with apparently no one bothering to actually look it up.

itronitron 4y ago
The Most Influential Paper Gerard Salton Never Wrote https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/items/1790 https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/items/1790
peter303 4y ago
Papers now have Data Objects of Interest reference links which are a smarter URL. When Ireview modern papers I am supposed to check all doi's work.
_0ffh 4y ago
Amazing story! I assume this is why you are supposed to always cite the paper that you have actually read, even if it in turn cites another paper (if you can't access that source yourself). If more people had actually stuck to that rule, finding the problem would have been a breeze instead of a serious investigation.
- anonymouskimmer 4y ago
  I had remembered that the preference was to cite the original source as much as possible (which is why the reference count for the Lowry protein assay paper is reportedly over 300k). The article linked here indirectly mentions this preference: > The problem in this case is that I omit a piece of information: the fact that Larsson’s statement is based on an entirely different source, namely Hamblin (1981). In other words, I am referring to an article that I very well know is a secondary source, and thus hide from my readers the fact that Larsson actually just passed on information published by Hamblin 14 years earlier. A good reason for avoiding the use of secondary sources in academia is that messages that pass through several links have the unfortunate tendency to become modified or altered along the way, as in the whisper game.
  - _0ffh 4y ago
    Yes, you cite the original source as much as possible, if you can verify that source by actually reading it. If you can't, you cite the secondary source as citing the primary source. (Think "Secundus writes that "Primus writes that ..."", or "Secundus cites Primus on ...".)
    - anonymouskimmer 4y ago
      Oh sure. But that shouldn't happen in science (journal articles). Worse case scenario you should be reverifying the original finding if you can't find the original article.
      - topaz0 4y ago
        "should" is the key here
- Al-Khwarizmi 4y ago
  What is the source for being "supposed to" do that? I have always practiced and encouraged the opposite. To cite the original source, even in the unfortunate cases where it can't be read (there's an example from mine in another thread in this post). It's a matter of giving credit where credit is due. It wouldn't make sense, e.g., for a seminal paper to not be cited because a later survey paper by different authors explained the findings better.
  - _0ffh 4y ago
    >It's a matter of giving credit where credit is due Yes, as I clarified in my answer to the older sibling of your comment >> If you can't, you cite the secondary source as citing the primary source. (Think "Secundus writes that "Primus writes that ..."", or "Secundus cites Primus on ...".) << The source is that this is what I was taught at university. Also, to me at least, this makes sense if you think it through. Just think about the trouble that not doing so has caused in the story reported in the gp comment. Edit: A quick search indicates that the American Psychological Association, for example, agrees with identifying both the direct and indirect source [1]. In the reference list, provide an entry for the secondary source that you used. In the text, identify the primary source and write “as cited in” the secondary source that you used. [1] https://apastyle.apa.org/style-grammar-guidelines/citations/secondary-sources https://apastyle.apa.org/style-grammar-guidelines/citations/...
    - Al-Khwarizmi 4y ago
      It can make sense sometimes, but I think it can often be awkward. If the thing being cited is highly known (which will often be the case, if it is still being cited despite the original document being lost in time) it will probably be cited in many secondary sources, and the citing author might very well not have learned it from any of them (but instead from a university course, a blog, etc.). Sure, one can randomly pick a textbook that they like and that cites that content, but this looks rather arbitrary to me. Personally it's not worth introducing that arbitrariness to solve this problem of "ghost" citations which is not especially common nor harmful. Maybe this is just a biased view... I'm from a country where they obsessively count metrics to evaluate researchers (not that I agree with that, but it's what they do), so being cited or not can be a big deal. I think the best solution might be to use the original citation but mark it somehow as inaccessible, that way it would be explicit that one is just citing for credit and did not really read the document. (I don't think I have seen this ever being done, though).
nullc 4y ago
It's fun tracking around wrong values of mathematical constants like Pi.

itronitron 4y ago

The Most Influential Paper Gerard Salton Never Wrote https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/items/1790 https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/items/1790

peter303 4y ago

Papers now have Data Objects of Interest reference links which are a smarter URL. When Ireview modern papers I am supposed to check all doi's work.

_0ffh 4y ago

Amazing story! I assume this is why you are supposed to always cite the paper that you have actually read, even if it in turn cites another paper (if you can't access that source yourself). If more people had actually stuck to that rule, finding the problem would have been a breeze instead of a serious investigation.

anonymouskimmer 4y ago
I had remembered that the preference was to cite the original source as much as possible (which is why the reference count for the Lowry protein assay paper is reportedly over 300k). The article linked here indirectly mentions this preference: > The problem in this case is that I omit a piece of information: the fact that Larsson’s statement is based on an entirely different source, namely Hamblin (1981). In other words, I am referring to an article that I very well know is a secondary source, and thus hide from my readers the fact that Larsson actually just passed on information published by Hamblin 14 years earlier. A good reason for avoiding the use of secondary sources in academia is that messages that pass through several links have the unfortunate tendency to become modified or altered along the way, as in the whisper game.
- _0ffh 4y ago
  Yes, you cite the original source as much as possible, if you can verify that source by actually reading it. If you can't, you cite the secondary source as citing the primary source. (Think "Secundus writes that "Primus writes that ..."", or "Secundus cites Primus on ...".)
  - anonymouskimmer 4y ago
    Oh sure. But that shouldn't happen in science (journal articles). Worse case scenario you should be reverifying the original finding if you can't find the original article.
    - topaz0 4y ago
      "should" is the key here
Al-Khwarizmi 4y ago
What is the source for being "supposed to" do that? I have always practiced and encouraged the opposite. To cite the original source, even in the unfortunate cases where it can't be read (there's an example from mine in another thread in this post). It's a matter of giving credit where credit is due. It wouldn't make sense, e.g., for a seminal paper to not be cited because a later survey paper by different authors explained the findings better.
- _0ffh 4y ago
  >It's a matter of giving credit where credit is due Yes, as I clarified in my answer to the older sibling of your comment >> If you can't, you cite the secondary source as citing the primary source. (Think "Secundus writes that "Primus writes that ..."", or "Secundus cites Primus on ...".) << The source is that this is what I was taught at university. Also, to me at least, this makes sense if you think it through. Just think about the trouble that not doing so has caused in the story reported in the gp comment. Edit: A quick search indicates that the American Psychological Association, for example, agrees with identifying both the direct and indirect source [1]. In the reference list, provide an entry for the secondary source that you used. In the text, identify the primary source and write “as cited in” the secondary source that you used. [1] https://apastyle.apa.org/style-grammar-guidelines/citations/secondary-sources https://apastyle.apa.org/style-grammar-guidelines/citations/...
  - Al-Khwarizmi 4y ago
    It can make sense sometimes, but I think it can often be awkward. If the thing being cited is highly known (which will often be the case, if it is still being cited despite the original document being lost in time) it will probably be cited in many secondary sources, and the citing author might very well not have learned it from any of them (but instead from a university course, a blog, etc.). Sure, one can randomly pick a textbook that they like and that cites that content, but this looks rather arbitrary to me. Personally it's not worth introducing that arbitrariness to solve this problem of "ghost" citations which is not especially common nor harmful. Maybe this is just a biased view... I'm from a country where they obsessively count metrics to evaluate researchers (not that I agree with that, but it's what they do), so being cited or not can be a big deal. I think the best solution might be to use the original citation but mark it somehow as inaccessible, that way it would be explicit that one is just citing for credit and did not really read the document. (I don't think I have seen this ever being done, though).

nullc 4y ago

It's fun tracking around wrong values of mathematical constants like Pi.