What I Meant Was, You Should See...

By -
these works I've listed, not that I have seen them.

That was my thought on reading yet another book whose references consist in footnotes that list only the author and year of a dozen or so other works, works from which not a single quote is used, of which no analysis is performed, and which are never referenced again in the work being read.1

1 For early works on how to pile up an impressive number of references in your work without actually reading any of them, see Smith(1692), Jones (1743), Johnson (1894), and Filbert (1902). For more modern approaches to padding your bibliography, consult Murphy (1963), Mangrove-Throatwarbler (1975), Fitzsimmons (1987) and Depardieu (2001). A game theoretic approach to pretending you've read any number of books you've never even laid eyes upon is discussed in Bozo (1999), Hunter (2002), Lesh (2004), and Alias (2007).

Comments

  1. Silas Barta1:31 PM

    Been reading Hoppe and Kinsella again?

    ReplyDelete
  2. gcallah1:36 PM

    Silas, it's amazing how common this is now in the economics literature. I'm actually reading a respectable author right now, and he does this throughout.

    ReplyDelete
  3. PH4:31 PM

    The author may be referring to the work taken as a whole. Depending on the topic of the article/book and the generality of the point it's cited for, that may make sense.

    But if those are the only citations, that is indeed weird. (Alas, it seems that the APA style guide sanctions such laziness.)

    ReplyDelete
  4. gcallah4:34 PM

    Yes, PSH, doing this once in a while is fine. But when reference after reference is like this, I start to suspect bibliography padding.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Libertarians, My Libertarians!

By -
Cruel to be kind means that I love you . Because, while I think you are mistaken, your hearts are in the right place -- yes, even you, Silas --  unlike some people . This Breitbart fellow (discussed in the link above), by all appearances, deliberately doctored a video of Shirley Sherrod to make her remarks appear virulently racist, when they had, in fact, the opposite import. I heard that at a recent Austrian conference, some folks were talking about "Callahan's conservative turn." While that description is not entirely inaccurate, I must say that a lot of these people who today call themselves conservative give me the heebie-jeebies.
Read more

"Pre-Galilean" Foolishness

By -
 I am currently reading The Master and His Emissary , which appears to be an excellent book. ("Appears" because I don't know the neuroscience literature well enough to say for sure, yet.) But then on page 186 I find: "Asking cognition, however, to give a perspective on the relationship between cognition and affect is like asking astronomer in the pre-Galilean geocentric world, whether, in his opinion, the sun moves round the earth of the earth around the sun. To ask a question alone would be enough to label one as mad." OK, this is garbage. First of all, it should be pre-Copernican, not pre-Galilean. But much worse is that people have seriously been considering heliocentrism for many centuries before Copernicus. Aristarchus had proposed a heliocentric model in the 4th-century BC. It had generally been considered wrong, but not "mad." (And wrong for scientific reasons: Why, for instance, did we not observe stellar parallax?) And when Copernicus propose...
Read more