Bibliographic negligence
Frank Norman
Thursday, 07 May 2009 08:45 UTC
In an editorial in The Scientist, Richard Gallagher reviews two recent cases of “bibliographic negligence”, where authors failed to cite relevant work, and suggests that “We need a code of practice for citation, which journals should adopt explicitly”.
He asks whether this kind of mispractice is on the increase but suggests it is not, rather that “the openness gifted us by the Internet is revealing the lax standards that have been in place all the time”.
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There is, of course a very large difference between trying “to oversell the novelty of their work by conveniently ignoring the work of others” as Darren noted above, or “ignorance of how science is supposed to work” as David notes, or between
- problems of access, including journal subscriptions, too expensive to many outside (and sometimes inside) of the US/EU/Japan/Oceania;
- issues dealing with language (i.e. prior publication in Chinese or German, or authors who are not fully proficient at English;
- differences in nomenclature/vocabulary, which makes PubMed/Scopus/WoS searches ineffective, or at least very difficult.
Whether bibliographic negligence is a matter of morally questionable behaviour is difficult to tell. An overview of literature in a field is, although it can be very extensive, never perfect.
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