Anyone have that experience where you want to see the source cited in a footnote and you go and you check the source and it doesn't support the text? I am happy to report that as true for articles 50, 60 years old as it is today. - ThreadSky

annmlipton.bsky.social • 219 days ago

Anyone have that experience where you want to see the source cited in a footnote and you go and you check the source and it doesn't support the text?

I am happy to report that as true for articles 50, 60 years old as it is today.

Comments

dandwig.bsky.social•218 days ago

People read a sentence or two that supports their argument, and not realize it's the lead in to a section refuting that. (Or they just need enough sources, and throw in anything with the right keywords).

lawnerd.bsky.social•218 days ago

I once saw that happen in a century-old HLR article. It cited a 25-century-old document by name, without giving a particular publication. I had to track down a translated version and check, and the characterization wasn’t really on point.

janetdonavan.bsky.social•218 days ago

This happens to me almost every day. Probably because I am a weirdo who reads too many footnotes.

berkeleyeve.bsky.social•218 days ago

footnotes are the honeycomb🥰

nafnlaus.bsky.social•218 days ago

"Proof by Ghost Reference"

lippard.bsky.social•218 days ago

yep, that's key to how I got out of fundamentalism in high school with the help of a young-earth creationist book, looking up its footnotes and finding that the author was a bald-faced liar.

botanicmanic.bsky.social•218 days ago

Samuel Thayer, a foraging author, will go on and on in his books about endlessly copied information from baseless sources in the 50's/60's. Often times foraging authors never eating most of the plants listed in their books!

matt.loar.name•218 days ago

As a law review cite-checker, an author made an assertion in the text, with a footnote that made an even stronger assertion, followed by [cc: need cite].

First Google result completely undercut the assertions, so I added a "But see" citation, expecting the editors to chew me out.

It got published.

janetlindenmuth.bsky.social•218 days ago

Yes, this is how the nonsense fact that Delaware gave the first bar exam got started.

mervaala.bsky.social•218 days ago

Just gonna leave this here again.

skeet.best•218 days ago

And 50, 60 years from now, they'll be citing sources that never even existed at all

meataumaton.bsky.social•218 days ago

Source: It was revealed to me in a dream

projectazar.com•219 days ago

When I was a footnotes and formatting editor for my law school publication, we had a situation where an author copied the footnotes from another, 50 y/o book to support his position and found the original source didn't support the claims of either the middle book or the new paper.

So fun.

annmlipton.bsky.social•219 days ago

well i'm discovering that just like today, 60 years ago people wrote entire articles based on refuting an argument that - if you check the footnotes - no one was making

berkeleyeve.bsky.social•218 days ago

refreshing! like we dont have the patent on this duplicity grift... somehw thats a nice feeling, that it's not just this internet-driven medaciousness, but part of the mighty river of misrepresentation. that there us something human one can depend on..

shaneconneely.bsky.social•218 days ago

I've a pal whose supervisor explained how great it was before the internet when were able to cite journals that would take weeks to arrive from other libraries, and people never would, so you'd just just go and submit your thesis without it being spotted

leroc.bsky.social•218 days ago

Theoretically, this is something that peer review should be able to weed out.

historiken.bsky.social•218 days ago

I have been that source and it is very irritating.

historiken.bsky.social•218 days ago

I have also been the source that someone cited because they couldn't be arsed to read the book that the article I wrote grew out of, even though the book handled the subject in question better and more directly.

historiken.bsky.social•218 days ago

this account is a ken alder stan account, and i will never stop recommending engineering the revolution

berkeleyeve.bsky.social•218 days ago

interesting! i just started reading James Scitt's Seeing Like A State. the quest for a standard of measurement in itself was such a big undertaking!

berkeleyeve.bsky.social•218 days ago

Scott🤦🏼‍♀️

historiken.bsky.social•218 days ago

I should check that out. Alder's other major book is The Measure of all Things, on the same subject.

berkeleyeve.bsky.social•218 days ago

i didnt know about Alder when i saw your reference to him. so i looked him up and saw that one, which connected. i do want to read it. digressing, did you ever read Pynchon's Mason & Dixon? similar template, particularly the astronomical observations... thru Pynchon's lens.

shaneconneely.bsky.social•218 days ago

My smarter half has a chapter on in for publication at the moment and according to her reading this is also true for cancer research, which isn't great (a lot of docs misinterpreting the stats, a lot of scientists misunderstanding clinical work, and a lot of egos boosting their own papers)

wudang96.bsky.social•218 days ago

No, but I once checked a general topic in a paper for publication and found the text from the paper. Yes. No changes, really.

Why did I check? I found too many inconsistencies in delivery. And there was the exact same summary in a different, already-published paper.

lisaspangenberg.info•218 days ago

Working on my dissertation especially, I saw citayions that did not support the assertion they were supposedly supporting, and astonoshing amounts pf plagarism.

riderius.bsky.social•218 days ago

The irrelevant or bullshit citation is old, old magic. I spent a lot of time swearing about it when doing literature searches for my PhD. Sympathy.

soniafocke.bsky.social•218 days ago

This. So much this. “Look, this 1 relief in this tiny corner of Karnak supports my theory & I’m not illustrating it & not everybody has access to a big-ass folio that costs literal thousands so I can footnote it!”
Haha no it doesn’t, no you can’t & I bet you didn’t see Internet Archive coming, hunh?

trevorabranch.bsky.social•218 days ago

Having that same experience myself, but it takes huge amounts of time to go back and find the original references.

vsapiro.bsky.social•218 days ago

Related: I have seen my first book cited many times in relation to things the book didn’t say. Clear that they were just dragging notes from other works, imagining what I said. Scholarly version of telephone.

audieklotz.bsky.social•218 days ago

Ditto—especially aggravating when they attribute claims exactly opposite of what my work said

egrunin.bsky.social•218 days ago

There's an article on Wikipedia where someone kept asserting person X did thing Y. It wasn't true—I was there—so I deleted it, with an explanation, but they kept putting it back. So I asked for a citation. They gave one, and it was irrelevant.

berkeleyeve.bsky.social•218 days ago

very Wikipedia, unfortunately

tomlevenson.bsky.social•218 days ago

It is the modus operandi for every David Brooks column I've bothered to check.

ckreeture.bsky.social•217 days ago

Hackery 101

fmckenna.bsky.social•219 days ago

I have the experience all the time. Some people believe footnotes are for elaborating on their unsupported point rather than providing a source/evidence for it.

daveworthington.bsky.social•218 days ago

My debate coach in college had an assignment for undergrads that made them look up 5 sources in a scholarly article. It was amazing how many errors the students found

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