Phony citations are only a problem in "peer-reviewed" and "peer-edited"professional journals. Public Health related journals appear to have the worst record. The Peers, apparently are too self-important to go through the time and effort of tracking down each citation and just accept them so long as the editor likes the article's conclusions. This doesn't occur in student-edited Law Reviews. They have plenty of second-year "grunts" to do the cite checking. I've just written three L. Rev. articles and in each instance I've had to supply one or more photocopies or scans of the quoted materials because the editors couldn't find it on their own. Thorough cite checking is the hallmark of every Law Review. It's the guarantee that the base is accurate, leaving only the author's conclusions to question. >From Clayton Cramer's Blog: http://www.claytoncramer.com/weblog/2008_07_06_archive.html#1787914066533523255
[quote]I'm So Surprised. July 8, 2008 ( http://insidehighered.com/news/2008/07/08/citation )Inside Higher Education ( http://insidehighered.com/news/2008/07/08/citation ) reports that there is a problem with the accuracy of citations in much [peer reviewed] scholarly publication: Citations figure prominently in academic promotion and peer review. Theoretically, scholarly references serve a dual purpose: They indicate an author’s familiarity with established literature and assign credit to previous work, while from the other direction many would argue they signal a paper’s relevance and standing within a discipline. ... As it turns out, scholars have already done some work quantifying problem citations, divided into two categories, “incorrect references” and “quotation errors.” The authors of the paper, J. Scott Armstrong of the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School and Malcolm Wright of the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute at the University of South Australia, Adelaide, write of the former type, “This problem has been extensively studied in the health literature ... 31 percent of the references in public health journals contained errors, and three percent of these were so severe that the referenced material could not be located.” More serious than such botched references are articles that incorrectly quote a cited paper or, as the authors put it, “misreport findings.” For example, in the same study of [public] health literature, they write, “authors’ descriptions of previous studies in public health journals differed from the original copy in 30 percent of references; half of these descriptions were unrelated to the quoting authors’ contentions.” [quote] ************************************************** Professor Joseph Olson, J.D., LL.M. o- 651-523-2142 Hamline University School of Law (MS-D2037) f- 651-523-2236 St. Paul, MN 55113-1235 c- 612-865-7956 [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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