Busted!

I was reviewing the work of someone who shall remain nameless and who happens to be a good technical person. This individual is pretty young and had never written a paper before. I was looking at the first draft of the document and I was editing the technical aspects of the paper when I found the following reference:

X-Author (in press) Title about something geologic: Bulletin of Something Important

This individual had pursued this work in ‘2001’ as part of an unpublished report (I’ll keep the real dates obscured for the sake of ‘privacy’) and I thought that maybe this particular reference might have been already published by the time I was reading this draft (2002). I decided to go to my favorite database ‘Science Citation Index’ also known as ‘Web of Knowledge’ and search for this reference. This is what I found:

X-Author (1991) Title about something geologic: Bulletin of Something Important, v. 7, no. 8, pp. 123-143

See what I am talking about? This reference was published 10 years before this author wrote the original unpublished report and 11 years before the first draft of the paper got to my desk. Busted!!!!!!

By this time my evil switch went to the ‘ON’ position. I went further and found out that most of the references on this draft were pretty old. I also found that ALL the references, including the ‘in press’ article, were contained in the most recent paper listed on the author’s reference list. Conclusion, the author only read one paper, copied all the references from that publication and didn’t even bother to recheck the accuracy of the reference list on Google Scholar.

A complete shame because I found the paper to be pretty good. The data was new, the analysis seemed to be consistent and well presented but then you always wonder about the technical integrity of everything else. What was the accuracy of most of these statements? Can I thrust all the other stuff as well? Are the scales accurate? (You know scales always torment me!).

My intention with this comment is not to scorch this particular author but to reflect about how we all put our reputations out there when we write something. It is very easy to see us embarrassingly naked if a reviewer actually does his/her work properly. An honest accidental mistake can be forgiven and forgotten even after publication (I must have several of those!), but an intentional offense like this one sticks on people’s minds (at least mine! not that it matters!). Maybe I am too old...

Finally, I was reading this entry from Wired Science last night: “The Classic, Beautiful and Controversial Books That Changed Science Forever” Really cool, hope you enjoy it too!