Honestly, if I could just write "go on NCBI and look around" in the reference section of my work it would cut the overall document writing time by /hours/
Reminds me of a calculas assignment I had once. I had the problem and the answer. I worked forward until I got stuck. Then I worked backwards from the answer until I got suck again. Then I wrote “poof a miracle happens”. I passed, my professor never mentioned the bridge.
I did this once on an organic chemistry exam. Couldnt figure out how to get past one part of a mechanism so i drew my arrows, wrote "magic?", then drew the next compound and completed the problem. No points off
The only reason I even remember the term Brownian motion is that for the conclusion for one of our high school chem experiments I wrote “this proves Brownian motion, I’m not sure how” to a comment of “at least you’re honest.” Still don’t know what it is
I swear no one died due to my weakness in calculas. I was a deck officer not an engineer. Just one of those mysteries that they would force deckies to go past the main we needed for our jobs.
This has real “normally my wife sorts out all my citations, types all my manuscripts, proofreads all my writing, comes up with most of my ideas…but she was unavailable during the writing of this chapter” vibes
A few years back there was a tumblr or Instagram account of real, actual acknowledgements sections of academic books written in the 1940s and 50s where men acknowledged their (often unnamed) wives for basically doing ALL their work and it was wild.
That's LMR - Last-Minute-Referencing - where a deadline is too close, but personal ethics (or fear) refuse to let you mini-plagiarize, and you feel compelled to write "..I read this somewhere and it was probably a book with a green cover? From.. the mid-40s, probably? Whatever."
Could the references pages of my dissertation just be “I promise I read a whole bunch of articles, textbooks, and people much smarter than I am while writing this enormous paper” ?
I have a few "placeholders" from my earliest #genealogy days of 40 years ago that look like this. I'm trying really hard to get to them all before I leave the planet.
It's writers like this who earn pointed comments in MY footnotes such as "[historian name] states that Colonel Smith was present at the battle, but unfortunately does not offer their source reference (see: [historian name, book title, place: publisher, date, page no., fn ... ])" 1/2 >>
<< Although: this is less me being snarky, than the necessity of pointing out to not-diligent people who have been happily quoting said historian's unreferenced assertions, that those assertions ARE unreferenced and should not be employed as truth in any critical piece of work! 2/2
Wait a minute. I actually bought a $65 book just to get the page number so I could cite it properly because "dodgy abuse of google to find a workaround since it isn't in any library within 200 miles" wasn't on the MLA chart. I clearly have a lot to learn from the old masters.
Rule of thumb for book buying: if the cost of the book and postage is less the cost of getting to the nearest library holding it then you are allowed to buy the book.
Depends what but yes. A lot of my women in engineering books end up at @womenslibrary.bsky.social which is only a few miles from where I live if I should need to look at them again.
I did have a moment a couple of weeks ago where I couldn't find a reference and then began to worry that I'd dreamt it. I thought, "Good God, how am I ever going to finish this project if I don't know what I've actually found and what I've dreamt?"
I hear you. Did you find it in the end?
I'm currently begging my jenga tower of tabs not to collapse, because that would mean having to rewrite the whole paper.
I did, thankfully. After re-reading a book and two articles in which it was nowhere to be found, I did find the note I had made, though of course not in the place I thought I'd made it 🤣
Often it’s a matter of not citing sine difficult-to-access source for a quote, or not reference it at all. I think the source of your footnote did it right.
Comments
*source: (shrugs)
But we should be able to.
Cause that would be awesome!
I'm currently begging my jenga tower of tabs not to collapse, because that would mean having to rewrite the whole paper.
Who made you read that book?
(Sorry, had to do this)
…….i have some stuff to rewrite