Discouraging verification: Citation practices across the disciplines

Journal of Scholarly Publishing

Volumn 37, Issue 2, 2006, Pages 98-118

  Henige, David ^a  

^a NONE

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 32544453831     PISSN: 11989742     EISSN: 17101166     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.3138/jsp.37.2.99     Document Type: Article

References (55)

1. My thanks to Marie Dvorzak and Don Wright for their help along the way.
2. 'Scientific Citation,' Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Scientific_citation
3. Steve Wise, 'Revolution in References: Give Readers a Chance by Putting Page Numbers,' Nature (23 November 2000): 402
4. Scientific Style and Format: the CBE Manual for Authors, Editors, and Publishers, 6th ed. (New York: Cambridge University Press 1994), 618
5. x because the inclusive pagination of the third article was not included in the bibliography at the end of the paper.
6. Jane Gregory, 'The Popularization and Excommunication of Fred Hoyle's 'Life-from-Space' Theory,' Public Understanding of Science 12, 1 (January 2003): 25-46, has more than fifty incomplete citations, usually, though not always, involving missing page numbers, lending a sense of presumably unintended irony to the title of the journal in which it appears.
7. Scientific Style and Format, 623
8. The C-S system is discussed ibid., 621-2
9. As one letter writer to Earth and Life Sciences Editing put it, 'I get the impression that economy is more highly valued than scientific clarity, resulting in a bibliography without complete titles.' M. Jeuken, 'Correspondence,' Earth and Life Science Editing 10 (January 1980): 6.
10. For a more general, but similar, point see Manfred Kochen, 'How Well Do We Acknowledge Intellectual Debts?' Journal of Documentation 43, 1 (March 1987): 54-64.
11. Oddly, or ironically, the first known application of the name-year (or Harvard) system, in 1881, did include page numbers where the author deemed them necessary. Edward L. Mark, 'Maturation, Fecundation, and Segmentation of Limax campestris, Binney,' Bulletin of the Museum of Comparative Zoology 6, 12 (1881): 173-625.
12. Compare Eli Chernin, 'The "Harvard System" A Mystery Dispelled,' British Medical Journal 297 (22 October 1988): 1062-3.
13. See, e.g., G. Nigel Gilbert, 'Referencing as Persuasion,' Social Studies of Science 7, 1 (February 1977): 113-22.
14. For examples of new electronic initiatives that discard page numbers entirely, replacing them with 'digital object identifiers' and 'smart identifiers,' see Rebecca Renner, 'Online Pioneer Winds Up Lost in Cyberspace,' Science 297 (30 August 2002): 1468-9. In these cases, even the best will in the world cannot narrow searches. It has long been popular in Europe, and is becoming more popular in the Americas, not to include in bibliographies inclusive page numbers for printed articles or chapters.
15. See, e.g., David Adam and Jonathan Knight, 'Publish, and Be Damned ...,' Nature 419 (24 October 2002): 772-6.
16. For some reasons not to do this see Nancy N. Pope, 'Accuracy of References in Ten library Science Journals,' Reference Quarterly 32, 4 (Winter 1992): 240-3;
17. M. Faith McLellan, L. Douglas Case, and Molly C. Barnett, 'Trust but Verify: The Accuracy of References in Four Anesthesia Journals,' Anesthesiology 77, 1 (July 1992): 185-88;
18. M.M. Todd and D.S., Warner, 'On the Importance of Inaccurate Bibliographic Citations,' Anesthesiology 78, 3(March 1993): 615-6;
19. K.W. Hinchcliff et al., 'Accuracy of References and Quotations in Veterinary Journals,' Journal of the American Veterinary Medicine Association 202, 3 (1 February 1993): 397-400;
20. K. Nishina et al., 'The Accuracy of Reference lists in Acta Anaesthesiologica Scandinavica,' Acta Anaesthesiologica Scandinavica 39, 5 (July 1995): 577-8;
21. Migiwa Asano et al., 'Improvement of the Accuracy of References in the Canadian Journal of Anaesthesia,' Canadian Journal of Anaesthesia 42, 5 (1 May 1995): 370-2;
22. Dana F. Wyles, 'Citation Errors in Two Journals of Psychiatry. A Retrospective Analysis,' Behavioral and Social Sciences Librarian 22, 2 (May 2004): 27-51;
23. Jean-François Gehanno, Stefan J. Darmoni, and Jean-François Caillard, 'Major Inaccuracies in Articles Citing Occupational or Environmental Medicine Papers and Their Implications,' Journal of the Medical Library Association 93, 1 (January 2005): 118-21, and the sources cited in these.
24. See, among many others, William Broad and Nicholas Wade, Betrayers of the Truth (New York: Simon & Schuster 1982);
25. L.D.J. Bross, Fifty Years of Folly and Fraud 'in the Name of Science' (Buffalo, NY: Biomedical Metatechnology Press 1994);
26. Raymond Sper and Andrzej Górski, eds., Scientific Misconduct: International Perspectives (Guildford, UK Opragen Publications 2000);
27. Horace F. Judson, The Great Betrayal. Fraud in Science (Orlando, FL: Harcourt 2004).
28. In this discussion, as in many other ways, I treat history as a humanity with some social-science overtones.
29. American Psychological Association, Publication Manual 5th ed. (Washington, DC: APA 2001), 120
30. Ibid., 121
31. A notorious example of the latter is Alan Sokal's shameless use of the tactic in his parodying article in Social Text in 1996. For the original article, and the surfeit of responses to it, see Editors of Lingua Franca, eds., The Sokal Hoax: The Sham that Shook the Academy (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press 2000).
32. Chicago Manual of Style, 15th ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 2003), 598
33. Joseph Gibaldi, MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers, 5th ed. (New York. Modern Language Association 1999), 211
34. Not surprisingly, there are numberless Web sites offering advice on matters of style and presentation. The ones I've looked at do a pretty good job of summarizing the advice offered by the various guides, although the greatest majority concentrate on the social sciences and humanities and are directed at a very specific target audience, sometimes no larger than a class. Many of them replicate their originals by failing to be as explicit as necessary.
35. 'Guidelines for Contributors,' Journal of Field Archaeology 28, 4 (Winter 2001): 477 (emphasis added). This conclusion is based on a canvass of issues from 2002 through part of 2005.
36. Matthew Liebmann, T.J. Ferguson, and Robert W. Preucel, 'Pueblo Settlement, Architecture, and Social Change in the Pueblo Revolt Era, A.D. 1680 to 1696,' Journal of Field Archaeology 30, 1 (Spring 2005): 45-60, 47 (emphasis added)
37. See, e.g., Keith Windschuttle, The Fabrication of Aboriginal History (Sydney: Macleay 2002), 131-4;
38. Robert Manne, ed., Whitewash: On Keith Windschuttle's Fabrication of Aboriginal History (Melbourne: Black Inc Agenda 2003), esp. 232-4;
39. Stuart MacIntyre, The History Wars (Carlton, Vic.: Melbourne University Press 2003), 162-70;
40. Keith Windschuttle, 'Doctored Evidence and Invented Incidents,' in Bain Attwood and S.G. Foster, eds., Frontier Conflict. The Australian Experience (Canberra: National Museum of Australia 2003), 105-7.
41. For periodic updates on the controversy see www.quadrant.org.au/php/ search.php and no doubt other Web sites as well, not least www.sydneyline.com, operated by Keith Windschuttle.
42. Both cases compiled an extensive historiography, for a brief but evenhanded treatment of the Bellesiles case see Peter C. Hoffer, Past Imperfect (New York: Public Affairs 2004), 141-71,
43. and for a post-mortem on the Abraham case see Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The 'Objectivity Question' and the American Historical Profession (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1988), 612-21,
44. and sources cited there. A third case - very similar to these two in the uses to which footnotes were put - is discussed in a series of short papers in Journal of Information Ethics.3, 1 (Spring 1994): 8-88,
45. all treating Stephen Oates's biography of Abraham Lincoln, With Malice Toward None (New York: Harper & Row 1977).
46. The case of the Science article mentioned above is palliated, but no more, by the fact that many of the sources cited so incompletely can be found hi full-text versions on the Web.
47. For instance, canvassing Earth and Life Science Editing from 1977 to 1985, when it ceased publication, turned up only a few passing references to this question. Nor did the standard book-length treatment of the field address the matter, see Maeve O'Connor, Editing Scientific Books and Journals (Tunbridge Wells, UK: Pitman Medical 1978).
48. In all cases there was considerably more interest in the content and format of reference lists or bibliographies, which is not a concern in this article. This attitude carried over to the other major editing newsletter of the time, CBE Views, see, for instance, C. Stuart Houston, 'Uniform Requirements for Literature Citation in Biomedical Journals,' CBE Views 5, 4.(Winter 1982): 13-5.
49. Wise, 'Revolution in References,' 402
50. Social Studies of Science 31, 1 (April 2001), 309-10. Ironically, the citation to Nature had the wrong page number listed.
51. Another note referred readers to the Social Studies of Science editor's own initiatives in that regard, which had taken place just the year before.
52. The question mark symbolizes my perplexity as to what grounds could possibly countenance this value system.
53. For arguments on this see David Henige, 'Being Fair to the Hounds: Theory vs. Practice in Annotation,' History in Africa 28 (2001): 95-127; 29 (2002): 68-88.
54. A note to a review in Earth and Life Science Editing reads, 'British Medical Journal, 1978, 1, 1334-6.'
55. I would not want to foist this citation on an otherwise tolerant interlibrary loan staff and expect to retain their goodwill. No author(s) and no effective date (BMJ is a weekly) would only result in extra work for already overworked segments of research libraries' staffs these days. They might even insist that I provide them with a shipshape reference, complete with all the necessary accoutrements, a task that would require a significant amount of needless labour. Heather Windle, 'Review of Maeve O'Connor, Editing Scientific Books and Journals,' Earth and Life Science Editing 8 (1979): 17. Windle was 'staff editor' of BMJ when she wrote this.