On 29 Jun 2009, at 7:21 am, jeremy hunsinger wrote:
> in my career i've found many mis-citations, I wonder if that is the
> same sort of thing. I don't mean 'incomplete, or improperly
> constructed citations' those are just poor proofreading... I mean
> citations that were not to the book, page number, referred to. That
> i find worrisome, especially when i cannot find the actual book page
> number in their work, perhaps it is a proofing error, but sometimes
> it could be more.
Yes, I too have found plenty of these. Sometimes it just seems to be
sloppy proofreading, but the more dodgy moments are where a vague
reference is made to a multi-volume work (without a page number) or
where the reference is nested within other books/papers that have
referenced it - I sometimes wonder whether the individual has ever
seen or understood the original.
Not getting back to the original work can lead researchers into a trap
where they merely repeat the interpretation of a previous researcher
or researchers. Fine if those interpretations are well founded, but
disastrous if earlier commentators made mistakes. I once saw a bizarre
outcome of this way of sloppy citation. I had read several PhD theses
that referenced a particular learning style instrument, indeed some of
them had based their entire study on this instrument and its
associated theoretical model. When I traced the instrument back to its
beginnings - itself a PhD thesis - I could not find a single instance
of the theoretical model or its operationalising questionnaire having
been subjected to any third party scrutiny: it had not been reviewed,
and crucially had not been subjected to any validation studies. So,
about half a dozen doctors of philosophy had graduated (in educational
technology in this case) with theses built upon very dodgy
foundations. It seemed to me that a sort of folklore had grown up
around this instrument - which was simple and beguiling - and numbers
of emerging researchers had followed unquestioningly.
David
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David Durling FDRS PhD http://durling.tel
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