Mutatis citandi
| 23 September, 2010 | Richard P. Grant |
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Martin Fenner at PLoS Blogs wrote an open letter in response to Christian Specht’s analysis of “mutations” in citations of the famous paper describing SDS-PAGE by Uli Laemmli.
Specht has now responded at The Scientist, with a thought-provoking conclusion:
However, the fact that citation variants can be inherited may be an indication for a much bigger problem, which is that authors often do not read the publications cited in their work. I can only speculate how this would affect the accuracy of their interpretations.
So, do you read every paper you cite when you write a manuscript? All responses are completely anonymous…
[poll id=10]
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This reminds me of a remark once made by a distinguished member of the National Academy Of Sciences at a NAS meeting in Washington DC. Upon hearing that a large number of articles had been retro-digitized and made available with open access, he said: “Fantastic, now I can finally read all the papers I’ve been citing.”
Thank you for mentioning my blog post. There are many interesting stories in this, including the question you asked in your survey. Because many journals limit the number of citations, you might also have read papers very relevant to your work that you didn’t cite. Which is also a problem.
Thanks Martin. That indeed is a totally awesome question, but this margin is too small to contain it.