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Scientists Don't Read the Papers They Cite
WatertonMan writes "Very interesting and sure to be controversial study that suggests most scientists don't read the papers they cite. This means that if one paper misreads a work the misreading propagates. It's a very interesting study and has big implications for science, in my opinion. New Scientist has a good overview of the work. Given that most attention to work has been in sloppy work on the experimental side (poor methadology or outright fraud) this suggests a whole other problem. A lot of the ultimate problem is that many in research are concerned more about publishing than in solving the issues they investigate. Ideally the point both in science and in academics in general is to understand the ideas. Yet those of you who've looked up footnotes realize that actually engaging the ideas of other researchers typically falls by the wayside. Often footnotes are there simply because references are needed. Engaging others works is secondary. I've always thought that the hard sciences were more immune to that effect than the humanities. I guess not."
I wouldn't either -- those things are boring! ;-)
Most of my classmates don't read the papers they write. Do we hold others to a higher standard?
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
This means that if one paper misreads a work the misreading propagates.
You're assuming the paper which mis-cites another gets read when it gets cited.
The One Rule Of Chess You'll Ever Need: Don't play someone who carries a kit in their bookbag.
...where no one reads the articles they cite. We are in good company!
I want to drag this out as long as possible. Bring me my protractor.
I have to do a research paper for next week! ^^
The ENIAC Demo Competition
Now wouldn't it be ironic if the prople who did this study to prove that scientists don't read articles that they cite didn't read the articles that they cite?
what's to say that even if other people write something about the topic that it's right? Plenty of poorly researched ideas move through circles and even end up in other's research.
Most people twist previous research to fit what they are trying to say anyway (that's the nature of it). AFAIAC it's all bullshit anyway.
Unless they are showing HARD evidence (which in recent months they have been making up as well) and others have reproduced the same results, it's all about money/greed/profit.
Yes.
1. Research
2. Make up shit.
3. Lie.
4. ???
5. Profit.
As shown earlier the wright brothers were not the first in flight and had not done their research.
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
We should crush all those who make foolish mistakes, just like that guy Karl Marx says in his "Communist Manifesto" (Marx, 65)
I've also seen the case where scientists will constantly refer to their own, or their coleagues' papers. This is an easy way to increase the "cited" count of the refered paper, making one's work look more usefull, even when the citation has little or no relevance to the current topic.
The study seemed to be checking for typos in citations. Just because a scientist has copied the text of a (wrongly typed) citation does not mean s/he has not read the paper. There is no law that says someone writing a paper has to type up every citation they make from scratch.
I'm almost tempted to say that this is a side-effect of all those teachers who said 'I want at least 10 references and a 5 page paper'. At least, I can't think of any serious reason why, even if someone was just publishing fluff, they'd need to bulk up the references with irrelevant ones. The only other thing I can immediately think of is that a reference becomes somewhat standard, so they use it for something they learned and forgot where they learned it from (you can't exactly say [11], 11. Professor Ragan's Astrophysics 521 class or [12], 12. Two dozen vaguely remembered textbooks). Even then, I suppose its bad form not to find some reference with the relevant information just to prove you're not making it up (yes, pi IS 3.1415....).
Another major problem with research papers is the "dissappearance" of those who actually do properly cite their sources.
/ web_citations.html)
As many of you know, the Internet is a great research tool these days. But unfortunately, it's too dynamic for the research world. "Most URL references [stand] more than a 50 percent chance of not existing after only six months." (from a Cornell study at http://www.news.cornell.edu/chronicle/00/12.14.00
I don't care as much if some researcher only reads parts and pieces of papers that they cite, but when the entier papers dissappear, that's a much bigger problem.
"The study, using term papers between 1996 and 1999, found that after four years the URL reference cited in a term paper stood an 80 percent chance of no longer existing."
Is Slashdot written to the maxim "no news is new news"?
Charles Darwin is known to have cited other people's work that he hadn't read (I forget the name of the author involved - not being in the field myself). Then there was the entire field of molecular biology in the 1990s, which suffered more scandals than a dyslexic shoe factory.
Slightly more relevant (though still stretching back decades) is that some authors don't read the papers they co-author - look at all the people who co-authored papers with Jan Schoen, the team who, with Ninov, "discovered" Ununoctium, etc.
Next you'll be telling us that (shock! horror!) some scientist pass off other peoples' work as their own, with a fascinating NEW revelation about Rosalind Franklin's work in the discovery of the DNA structure.
Anyone who see how sme articles are written, knows perfectly that "bibliography" is usually created as a "necessary evil". Most scientific articles are done basically in the light of several "obligatory templates": abstraction, main article, citations, bibliography and notes. Frequently, real authors are not the ones you see first in the header of the article but someone in the end of it. Also, sometimes, certain people do the most flagrant plagiates out of the work of their students or co-workers.
What I call "academical science" is full of huge problems, which sometimes reach the level of flagrant falsifications and demagogic manipulation of facts. While not being a scientist per se, I have seen how these things pass the limits ethics and moral in such a thing like Mars. There is one scientist who tragically died in a very strange situation. Apart of the conditions of the tragedy, there was one big "authority" on Mars who lied with all his teeth about the work of his deceased colleague. Frankly, it was shocking to see how this guy flagrantly and demagogically "reinterpreted" the intentions of the scientific work of his colleague. One should note that both guys were highly considered in the community. However, they were adversaries. One died, the other became a big scientific authority on Mars. One of the reasons, was that he made a lot to desmise the works that went against his theories
The next question is: "How many peer-reviewed papers are actually reviewed?"
And what about the brothers who were awarded PHDs in physics for what looks like a hoax ala the Social Text incident?
http://www.thepoorman.net/archives/001517.html
in terms of reading what is cited (being an English major and soon to be English teacher, I know somewhat whereof I speak) I'd say the humanities are better on the whole about really reading what they cite. All we have to write about is what we have read. In the sciences one can experiment, test, etc. and write about those results, then go to the published literature for more info. The humanities do not offer that luxury, so to speak.
my pet machine
This paper takes some very simple statistical models and turns them into what seem to be totally unfounded generalizations about the way science is done. Taking their statistical conclusions at face value, we find that 77% of the people who cited the paper didn't read it in its original form. But, they go on to conclude that a) the only source of information about the paper could have come from a single other paper (namely, the paper with the original citation), and b) misunderstandings about the conclusions drawn by a paper will spread "like wildfire." They do not actually demonstrate this latter conclusion, and don't show that any of the papers actually did misconstrue the science in the original paper.
This is because heavily cited papers become very widely known and understood. Not everybody who's ever cited "The Origin of the Species" has read the whole thing, but it certainly then does not follow that they took their understandings of its conclusions from a single other citing paper.
They end their article with a smug admonition to "read before you cite." These guys sound like the guy with a clean desk who never gets anything done complaining about all the clutter on your desk. Smug social scientists criticizing physicists for their lack of citation rigor does not impress me. There are plenty of better reasons to criticize physicists this year (e.g., Ninov and Schoen). This one seems a bit silly.
* mild mannered physics grad student by day *
* daring code hacker by night *
http://www.silent-tristero.com
Well, it may be a troll, but the fact remains that some very prominent scientists claim that the HIV -> AIS theory wasn't proven before it was adopted.
Their claim is that this exact thing happened in the early 80's, and that instead of actually reading the research that said that HIV may cause AIDS (which was inconclusive) they simply took the ball and ran with it, causing years of research to be based on the same incorrectly cited source.
Who knows what the answer is, but it's a fascinating subject to read up on.
This doesn't come as news for me..
As a student starting my PhD studies, I once asked a researcher at the department about a paper. He told me he hadn't read it.
The next day, I saw that he had indeed quoted that paper in one of his.
However, it usually isn't such a big problem,
when papers are cited without being read, since it usually only happens with papers periferial to the subject.
(For example to justify a certain method or procedure that is common practice)
Also, sometimes the relevant portion of an paper can be summed up in one sentence, or in the abstract.
And that's how it all begins. You have academic staff being rated more for how much they publish than how much they teach; how much time do they have, really, to *teach* their assigned students, much less grade their assignments and papers? When grading their papers, how much time do they really have to pursue all the references etc.?
:-). You did NOT want to be one who gets an email saying something along the lines of "I've never heard of this. Show me. "
.
I had one professor who would randomly check up on various references in papers submitted to him (the joys of statistical sampling
Knowing that there's some (realistic) percentage of being found out, presumably most people would be careful - but nonetheless since he cannot possibly check EVERYTHING, some people will be tempted to try their luck. At least some (most?) will get away with it. And for those who know their profs won't be hunting down everything... what's to stop them?
And like most crimes, you just keep doing it and doing it... until (if) you get caught (I don't think Winona Ryder's *only* "shoplifting experience" was the one she went to trial for). So presumably at least a percentage of those doing scientific research had had undergrad + postgrad experiences of "getting away with it". Could get to be a habit.
Heck, if even reusing *faked* graphs in multiple papers can be gotten-away-with...
When I wrote my thesis for MS in Computer Science, my advisor strongly suggested that I include several references to his previous work, the work of several of his past students and a Professor at another school that would write reviews of his books (he would review the other Prof's books). All of this occurred during the final chop and two weeks from graduation. If it was up to me, I would not have included any of these references. But I was not the one signing off the last two years of my life as complete.
The funny part is that I received the largest portion of help from a couple of Sun engineers who were able to get me through some code which my advisor could not and except for the acknowledgement, their contribution was poorly documented (at least in my mind, not the advisor's).
So, if you read my paper, you would think that I am an idiot because some of the referenced work is so basic and at other times a super genius because the code was assisted by some great programmers (after all, how many people read the acknowledgements).
Copying a reference string doesn't mean that you haven't read the paper in question. To take a personal example of what I've done:
1. Find a reference to a paper which looks interesting.
2. Walk down to the library, remembering that you're looking for Bob's paper about bars in the Journal of Foo.
3. Arrive in the library, find the paper, read it, decide it is important.
4. Walk back to computer, copy out reference string.
It's quite easy to look up a paper from a slightly-wrong reference, and as long as the reference is close to correct, it's fairly easy to not realize that the reference was wrong in the first place.
Tarsnap: Online backups for the truly paranoid
Slashdot readers don't even read the articles they cite... What's this world coming to?
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
Anyone responding to posts with 'RTFA' will be considered guilty of recursion weithout a terminating condition.
Blearf. Blearf, I say.
Anyway, this comic seems appropriate.
I've looked into this topic and found some very interesting quotes regarding the subject. Scientific American probably states that "while a minority of scientists perform bad science, most do go through the process" (Scientific American, 3). Some magazines might goes as far to say "our scientists should be hailed for their rigor and attention to detail in these works" (Popular Science, XVIII). Some detractors have maybe said "hey, these scientists are free-loading off government cheese" (Popular Mechanics, 12XVII424CVV). I hypothesize that most of scientists out there read what they write about. As you can see from my rock-solid sources, there is no disputing this fact.
I'll form my OWN solar system! With blackjack! And hookers!
Gee ... most scientists use a program (like Endnote) to format bibliographies, using data downloaded from a database (like PubMed). I suspect that this is more a deficiency in proofreading reference lists and assuming that databases are correct, rather than a lack of reading the original material. Whether people read articles carefully is another matter, of course.
In fact, a blatant miscitation of a given reference would often get caught during the peer review process. This happened to me once when I rewrote part of a paper and forgot to remove one of the references that no longer applied ...
- Ideally the point both in science and in academics in general is to understand the ideas.
True, and most scientists go into the profession with this in mind. I think that most hold to this ideal as much as they can throughout their careers, but they also have to face the reality that their job security (achieving tenure, for an academic) and funding are based in part on their publication count. That's counter to the ideal situation. We'd all like to think of scientists locked away in their labs, very nobly trying to understand the world and explain it to their fellow citizens. Scientists would like to think that what they do is that romantic, too. But then they forge through grad school, get a post-doc somewhere, and realize that they damn well better publish a bunch of papers, or their career is going nowhere. Then maybe they get lucky and find a tenure-track job somewhere, and suddenly they have a teaching load to worry about, plus ever-increasing committee work within their department and university, plus smaller, but still significant tasks, like refereeing their peers' papers. It's a lot of work. More hours of work in a week than the majority of the working force has to put in. Research gets squeezed thinner and thinner, and your time becomes more precious. Yet you're still expected to remain productive and publish a bunch. So the romantic ideal of the lone scientist exploring the mysteries of the universe with a complete focus only on the nobility of the pursuit of knowledge for the sake of knowledge is a little far-fetched.This, of course, does not justify in any way the falsification of work (which, I think, is extremely uncommon - it's just that we've recently heard about a particularly egregious case of this), nor does it justify propagating misinformation as a result of improper literature citation. I'm just pointing out that the ideal mentioned by the submitter is just that - an ideal.
To support the view that observations got better and better, requiring more and more circles, you'll probably find most of these sources citing a book by J.L.E. Dreyer, written in the beginning of the previous century, but it exists in a few editions published later.
But Dreyer says the opposite:
Basically, if these people had actually read Dreyer, we wouldn't have had to struggle with this myth any longer. Of course, there's a lot more to this story than this, but I don't have time to write it now... :-)
Employee of Inrupt, Project Release Manager and Community Manager for Solid
Unfortunately, your characterization of science is flawed. Rarely does a scientist go into a lab and perform an experiement that is 100 percent original. Generally, the origins of the experiment can be traced back to earlier work, that he/she learned about thru publications, conferences, etc. Furthermore, scientists try to be somewhat original. Therefore, considerable effort is spent researching the published literature to make sure you're not repeating something someone did 5 years ago. If you repeat it, you want to put your own "spin" on it. E.g., look at new aspects of the problem.
Doesn't this point to a failure of the peer review process? Aren't the reviewers bothering to check whether the references are relevant, and for the ones that are, whether the paper actually interprets and builds on the prior work in a reasonable manner?
You don't have to necessarily read them as long as you make sure to use a well respected credible resources!
I stole this Sig
I am probably one of the few people out there who has ever leafed through academic journals for fun. Still, those things are incredibly boring.
The issue here is that people expect articles to have a certain shape, form, and style, including a literature review. And a lit review can be a pain. You don't want to read an article more than is required to get the basic gist of its relevance to your work. Sometimes, that can be done by reading just the abstract.
The suggested rate of non-reading articles is also possibly overstated. That one has mis-cited a work does not necessarily mean that one has not read it. I can, for example, read an article ten years ago and remember the basic meaning I need to take out of it, and include it in my own references upon seeing it in the references of another's work without refreshing my knowledge of the work. Or I could just use another work's references as a reading checklist and not bother to correct it (or be unaware of the mistake if I sent a poor grad student or some other lackey to the library to copy the journal for me).
I assume the full article by Simkin and Roychowdhury probably states the likely sources of commonly copied errors. I'm a tad curious to se whether the authors of those progenitor articles propagated their own mistakes in future articles or if they corrected them.
While the article claims that "a billion different versions of erroneous reference are possible," in practice that may not be as true. With the errors being volume, page, or year, the most likely errors are transposition of two digits, deletion of a digit, insertion of a digit, or replacement of a digit. In the latter two, the error will most likely be the use of a neighboring number on the keyboard. A one is much less likely to be replaced by a nine than by a two. That is unlikely to lower the probably number of copied citations to below 50%, but it is still a possible source of error that may or may not be accounted for.
I wanted to take up the point in the article that many researchers are more interested in publishing than in solving the issues they investigate. I'm going to preface this by stating that I'm a psych. major and, as such, do not have much knowledge of the specifics of other fields, but I assume their requirements are similar.
In university settings, it is all about how many papers you have published. When a professor is first accepted to the faculty of a university, he/she must "publish or perish" for the first 5(+[?]) years. If you do not publish often enough in those first years, you are not retained. Things get better after you get tenure; you are not required to publish as often. So, it should not come as too great a surprise if people are more interested in publishing than solving the issues.
I personally think the requirements of universities should change so that we are not searching through a glut of papers, all saying many of the same things (or close enough). I am more concerned with the falsification of data, which totally throws everything off, than with a tendency to publish papers that don't necessarily solve the issues, which makes finding relevant research difficult but shouldn't substantially hurt the future of the field.
"I swear I won't break you if you let me take you where the willows never weep" -- Switchblade Symphony
I can't speak for others, but I always read the papers I cite in mine. That's because I try to limit myself to citing papers that are actually relevant to what I'm talking about and have exerted some kind of influence on the contents of my paper. Now it's becoming clear to me why my papers always seem to have so many fewer references than the other papers I read.
There's no point in questioning authority if you aren't going to listen to the answers.
Black people like fried chicken and watermelon, Italians men are as slutty as French women, and white men can't jump.
Seriously, you should qualify your statements before you go creating new negative stereotypes. I've known my share of publish-aholics, but I've also known several scientists with deep personal integrity who only care about results.
QUALIFY!
Austin is more fun than Dallas.
I have had to fix the spelling of my own name in a reference I copied...other than that it's a good thing. I try to be really careful when I have to type in the reference myself, usually a recent paper or something from another field. I have to decide whether to list all the authors or do an "et al" after who you think are the main authors. Whether to write out the complete name of the journal/conference or its common short name. I do try to proof read the reference, but sometimes I read the paper and used it but can't find it and the deadline is quickly approaching, it would be more wrong to leave it out than to use the possibly slightly off reference, esp if I used that reference to find the paper in the first place. If it had been far off enough to cause me trouble I would have remembered. Of course you want them to be correct since the editor will look at your references when looking for people to review your paper...
Sometimes all someone wants is a certain result from a paper. Reading and understanding the full reasoning behind a result rather than the result itself may mean the difference between an afternoon of work and 3 weeks of work. Multiply that by the number of citations a paper has, and a hapless but well-meaning scientist would spend all their time digesting their citations rather than publishing papers and would soon be relieved of their position.
Understanding the details behind cited results is certainly very important, but in the real world there are real tradeoffs that researchers constantly have to evaluate professionally regarding how much time they spend understanding and in how much detail they understand any given result.
This posting is interesting, certainly, but it is not news.
-- My choice of computing platform is a symbol of my individuality and belief in personal freedom.
> New Scientist has a good overview of the work.
...Rather than read that study, why not glance at this news-edited abbreviation?"
LOL. An obvious case of a submitter without ZERO sense of irony.
"There's a new study which suggests scientists don't read the studies which they cite.
crib
Please don't read my journal
...most scientists don't read the papers they cite. This means that if one paper misreads a work the misreading propagates.
If they're not reading the papers, why would it propagate?
With so many similar topics appearing all across the IP landscape, here's the trend I'm seeing:
The simple capatalistic need to own and be given various forms of credit for ideas has taken precidence over the need to actually solve and understand problems.
That's not to say that capitolism is at all bad, but this aspect of our modern version of it is something that appears can lead to eventual deadlock in societies' and individuals' ability to get anything done. Scientists need to work on something they can own, so many ignore many otherwise important topics. Inventors need to avoid anything in the commercial market, so many find their ability to improve things is greatly hampered. Writers and archivists must carefully avoid soemtimes broad concepts that are claimed by powerful interests, so must limit their imagination as important ideas rot en mass.
Completely new ideas are a powerful thing, and should of course be encouraged - but the ideas that are actually useful to people are not often completely new. Our encouragement of new ideas should not be at the cost of the very usefulness of ideas in general! Exploitation of ideas is the overall idea behind copyright and the like, but one does not have to own the very core concepts themselves to exploit the ideas - to own the core concepts themselves ends up exploiting people rather than exploiting ideas, keeping everyone else from being able to bring many new ideas to society. New ideas don't often just spring from nowhere - people have to be able to combine concepts, using existing ideas.
Ryan Fenton
I've grown tired of hearing members of the so-called 'medical' profession lecture me on how 'risky' my 'high-protein' diet is (seems most doctors are functionally deaf and/or immune to learning anything at all from a non-doctor). I gotta wonder how much more 'risky' my MODERATE protein is than being more than 100 lbs overweight. Seems doctors only read the conclusions of studies, and not the actual studies. I have come to the conclusion (based on my personal experience, and comparing notes with several dozen others in the same situation) that the typical 'research' paper follows these steps:
1: Write down a conclusion
2: Write a paper supporting that conclusion
3: Do some 'research', carefully structured to support that conclusion
4: Discount or discard any data that doesn't support that conclusion
5: Get the paper reviewed by a group of associates that agree with your conclusion
6: Publish the paper in some mutual-admiration society journal
My favorite along these lines is one entitled "Type 2 Diabetics Benefit From Reducing Intake Of Animal Protein". If you read the summary very carefully, you will see that the 'researchers' removed the SUGAR from the diet, and then concluded, from the resulting health improvements, that animal protein causes type II diabetes. (!!) This is, unfortunately, typical of what passes for 'science' in the study of diet.
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So, honestly... How many of you, in college, fudged footnotes and works cited every once in a while? That totally doesn't make it right, and I'm certainly not advocating doing so, but generally speaking my professors never checked up on stuff like that -- and who can blame them, in a class of 100 or more they certainly don't have the time. But it does foster the same thing down the line, which might be what we're seeing here...
Statistically speaking, there's a 99.998% chance that my IQ is higher than yours. Get over it.
Patent and Copyright! The whipping boys of slashdot. Of course, not just because we have problems with these two things, but because they are partially to blame. Scientists, like corporations, are concerned about money. They don't keep their jobs if they don't patent or copyright anything. Publish or perish. So rather than continue researching/experimenting until they arrive at the truth they will just strive to create something patentable or copyrightable whether it works or not. Then wait for someone else to do a 5 year study on the effects of what they've made.
1. Write paper and cite other papers I haven't read.
2. Publish paper.
3. Profit!
Alternative?
work for greater good of humanity
and starve.
What would you do?
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The article in question was cited 4300 times. That is a lot. This would suggest this must be a fundamental paper for that particular field. How many times has the paper been discussed in classes, discussions, literature clubs, etc.? If so, the scientists are probably very well acquainted with the work, with out having the paper on their desk while typing in the reference. You can easily grab another paper that cites the original, with out digging through your file cabinet full of papers. Managing references can be a huge task. I have a small collection of papers, but even this is over 250. I know others with over 1,000. Any yes, we have read every one of them. That doesn't guaranty I will pull the paper out of my drawer every time I cite it. Many others in this discussion have also mentioned inaccuracies in the databases. It does happen, if you don't agree talk to your local inter-library loan. Contrary to the media's perspective, you should never believe what you read until you have tested it yourself or others have confirmed the work. Didn't Einstein say "Believe Nothing"?
Take a look at the ACM or IEEE and the number of journals they support, then toss in folks like Springer Verlag. Figure out how many articles are published in these each year. Just from counting you might determine that many of these are pretty meaningless. Try reading a few at random and see if you change your mind.
Now remember that the folks on a tenure/promotion committee know nothing about what a researcher might do - they're even more ignorant of the research field of someone else than they are of their own. So, how do they determine how good a researcher might be? They're sure as hell not going to wade through yet another meaningless paper. Its simple. They count. How many publications? How many grants? How many citation from other papers to the researcher's papers?
And its an interesting feedback loop: even getting a publication or grant can depend on your publication and grant history. And if you suspect that someone might be reviewing your paper/proposal who works in the same area, you might want to make sure there are a couple of citations (always positive, naturally) of that persons work included.
So, we know someone wants publications/grants/citations and they need p./g./c. to get p./g./c.. They do some research, it depends heavily on two or three other bits of research. But two or three citations aren't enough. So they might want to use the citations they find in the work they cite. OK. This citation looks good perhaps, but the original article isn't available in the local library and inter-library-loan will take a month to get it and the deadline is next week. Oh well. Cite away - the original author isn't likely to complain (after all this is another citation to his/her work).
And so it goes.
As someone who has written a number of scientific papers (and yes, sometimes, but not often, cited articles that I haven't read), I think there are a couple of reason contributing to the problem:
1) Cost of journals -- often there is an article that ought to be cited in your work (because it was published before yours, and is related), but is in a journal unavailable at your university's library. There are thousands of journals, and their high costs (often thousands of dollars a year each) means that no library can have them all. But why not simply ignore an article you haven't read? Read on.
2) Pride of Reviewers -- When a scientific article is sent to a journal, it is passed on to several researchers who are doing similar work for peer review. While it would nice to think that reviewers are not so petty, the fact is, if you haven't cited their work, they might get angry and reject the paper. So, authors feel that it is better safe than sorry and cite freely.
The real problem here is inherent in the academic system. Research faculty are in a situation where they are being judged by the amount of papers they put out, and not on the quality or the potential of their work. This leads to unscrupulous individuals doing "whatever it takes" to get ahead.
What needs to be done is to reform the way merit is assigned in academia. Research funding and tenure need to be allocated based not only on the quantity of publications but on other factors which may be harder to measure, factors that would be better indicators of the value of their research.
A somewhat related issue is that more and more private sector funding is flowing into universities and along with that funding comes the expectation of a quick return on investment. This creates more pressure to pursue short-term goals with little long-term impact on the field of study.
Taken together, US scientific research is destined to fall behind and stop making new breakthroughs. Seemingly, the only apparent solution to this is to increase the amount of public funding available for basic research. It would seem, though, this is not likely to happen given the current regime in Washington. A more likely outcome will be that our scientific institutions will all be doing R&D for the big corporations in the near future.
A lot of the ultimate problem is that many in research are concerned more about publishing than in solving the issues they investigate.
The problem is that the higher-ups in the university system essentially mandate a certain number of peer reviewed publications for promotions, hell even to keep your job if you're not tenured. This, I feel, is part of the problem in that we're pushed so hard to get X number of publications per year. In a sense it's necessary to weed out the smucks (anyone can get a Ph.D. nowadays), but it also can cause the quality of the research to decline. The whole quality vs. quantity argument.
Just my $0.02.
Where does this guy get off? Everybody knows that technical people always read every piece of pertinent information available to them! Case in point: Slashdot's readership reads every article before they think about posting. I think I've proven my point.
*removing tongue from cheek*... I hope everyone got that.
Lack of eloquence does not denote lack of intelligence, though they often coincide.
I'm just learning how to be an academic and I've already done this a couple of times. Deadlines were pressing and I was trying to focus on the information I needed for my papers. I read the relevant parts quickly a couple of times, but certainly not thoroughly. Unless I later thought that I truly didn't understand something I didn't bother to look more closely.
Plus even if you read and really do understand the main part of a paper you might make a simple mistake like missing a key assumption in the introduction (which I don't imagine too many people pay much attention to) and then end up stating a result without that assumption, and then anybody who uses your paper is getting bad information. It probably doesn't happen often, but even just a few times could cause huge problems.
It's probably excusable when a novice like myself doesn't look too closely. After all, we're still learning. Plus I know it's a bad habit and I'm trying not to continue it. However, if this is happening with more experienced academics, it is quite scary!
So including information for someone else's benefit, that would have to be researched anyway in order to understand a subject, is unimportant now, just because I'm a busy man?
Keep your packets off my GNU/Girlfriend!
Looking into it what happened was this. She had found some interesting citations at the end of a paper, looked up the articles and read them. Then when she was preparing our manuscript rather than track down the papers in a file drawer she just copied the citations as they had appeared in the original citing paper. thus she preserved the exact same typos. word for word.
I have however seen another way that typos propagate. Say I was a graduate student on a series of papers where my advisor often trotted out the same citations to make the same points about the same seminal peices of work. Other papers I write with him as co-author get the same boilerplate. Eventually I write a paper on which he is not on the author list but I put in the same boiler plate. oops. I just cited a paper I never read myself. Believe me it happens, though it is not neccessarily inaccurate.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Slashdotters are interested in Science, Slashdotters don't RTFA
Scientists are interested in Science, Scientists don't RTFA
Therefore, People who read Slashdot must be Scientists!
Now if I can only convince my employer that I need a dual procesor box with a GeForce4 for research in "Hand-eye coordination and its development as influenced by realistically rendered 3D environments: A study in vitual ordinance trajectories and avoidance"
When I write a research paper, first I determine what evidence I need, Google for a paper that has that kind of info cited, copy/paste their footnote entry, and voila. It runs completely counter to any intellectually honest attempt to actually figure out what is correct, but it's sure as hell the most efficient way to get an A on a research paper. It would take 10 to 20 times more time to do a research paper if I had to actually read my sources, and NO ONE I know has that kind of time. The system encourages this kind of thing.
Repeal the DMCA!
This is pretty ironic - I'm sitting here in my lab at Stanford writing up a computational biology paper as I'm reading this (I'm a graduate student) and I have to admit it's kinda true. I wanted to reference the ways people have converted evolutionary sequence conservation into probability matrices, and so I found a fairly recent paper that also wanted to reference that, and I more or less copied those references. I did examine the papers, but I certainly did not read them thoroughly. But I would say that I indeed have read the most important references dealing with the center of my work. So I would argue that most references in paper introductions are not thorougly read, but anything referenced in 'methods' or 'results' sections are most-likely well-read and understood by the authors. And yes, there is incredible pressure to publish in science - your graduate school career is more or less completely judged by your publication output. If you only have 1 (or 0) papers, people will wonder what you were doing and are less likely to give you the killer Bioinformatics job you're looking for. :)
Personally, and I'm totally serious about this, I'd blame it on the assignments we get in both high school and college wherein the teacher/professor, in a well-meaning attempt to indoctrinate us in the ways of the academic, says "You must include (5/10/30) citations in your final paper!" (And no more then X may come from whatever bad thing students are using... encyclopedias in my day, now the Internet.)
Totally naturally, we go out, find 1.5*X citations, winnow out the obvious losers, and randomly cite them at the end of our papers, having read maybe one of them. Because we all know the teacher/prof doesn't have time to check even one of them from each of our papers, let alone check them all. How many of us have completely manufactured a citation from whole cloth for one of these things and totally gotten away with it? (I haven't myself, but I certainly thought about it; the only reason I didn't is it was generally easier to just go get likely looking citations on the Internet. Teacher never realizes you "used the Internet" if you cite paper journals....)
Certainly you don't think this habit is going to go away just because they got a degree, when the stakes are even higher? Everybody else's six-page research papers have 40 citations at the end, if yours don't you'll stick out, and that's bad.
It would probably be better to require that students cite as appropriate, and require at least a spot check of the citations for at least one random assignment at some point in a student's career.
I'm writing something in my spare time that might in some sense be considered an academic paper, but I just use footnotes as appropriate. Citations are often overrated when they are used as a cover for "We've known this and endlessly debated this in the field for the past 50 years, but I can squeeze seven pointless, information-free citations out of this" sorts of things.
Note I'm not saying that citations are unimportent or that they should be abolished; they are legitimately importent and useful. I'm just saying the the stupid way they are handled in school has natural consequences in the resulting academics, and their value is unnecessarily diminished as a result.
I think people forget that the Hard Sciences are made up of people, same as the social sciences, and also have the usual problems associated with using people to try to get stuff done. (Although I'm not sure I'd put not reading all of the papers you site real high on the list - if all you're after is one point in a long and complex paper that seems like a fairly inefficient use of time. Some of these papers are HARD to understand.)
What gives the Hard Sciences the right to that title is that, eventually, someone will root out the bull that someone else has published, brand it as such, other people will check it and agree, and it dies. You can prove someone WRONG. Try that in the social sciences - has anyone ever heard of a huge scandal where someone faked results in the social sciences? They would get in trouble if they didn't do the studies and were found out, but can you prove that they cheated just by taking their conclusions, working with them, and crying foul when something doesn't work? In the Hard Sciences, you can. That's what makes them so strong and practical.
Not that Social Sciences are worthless, mind you. It's just that BS seems to be a lot easier to get away with there. Sort of like in English class, when we were supposed to get the meaning out of a book. I never get the meaning the author's trying to convey (or at least what they say later he/she was trying to convey), but I wrote down something and got a good grade. Because how could they prove my thinking about the book wrong? I think the social sciences have a little of that problem in them somewhere. Controlled experiments are really tough to do, so you run into problems.
"I object to doing things that computers can do." -- Olin Shivers, lispers.org
Companies can truly profit from research. Their research tends to be more application-oriented, and thus profit-oriented. They are doing research for a market. Academia is doing research for knowledge (for the most part). There is a huge difference.
You seem to think that there is no difference between academic research and industrial research. Nothing could be farther from the truth. They are very distinct, and have completely different motives. If a scientist wanted to make money based off of productivity and profit, he works for industry, where the pay is substantially higher than in academia. There is also the added pressure of marketing departments, supervisors, human resources, etc. In academia, you are pretty much your own boss. They are completely different worlds. I've seen it with my own eyes at Bell Labs, TRW, and several universities, and also NASA. I think your assessment is a little misguided.
If science involved the mere writing of papers, it would be politics, and I would be worried about this.
But, the Scientific Method is clearly not going anywhere, and reproduceability is a very strict standard.
Now, I agree that there would be some difference between the experimental sciences and the evidential sciences (archaeology, etc...) in this regard, where the temptation to "promote" an idea is not as tempered by the fear of immediate embarrassment.
However, certainly in experimental science, the lifespan of any unsupportable idea is inversely proportionate to the degree of interest in that idea, which is the perfect governor.
Machines take me by surprise with great frequency. -A. Turing
Isn't that dangerous though? No one knows what the citations are really about more than the people that wrote them. If you cite a reviewer's paper without reading the paper first, you risk looking like an ass when your paper hits their desk!
True, and I'm not saying it's a wise idea to do if you can possibly avoid it. But often you can get a pretty good idea about what the paper says from reading the abstract (which is generally freely available on-line, even if the paper itself isn't)
Publishing is part of the process, not the result of the process.
Universities, governments, and corporate science divisions have been paying for raw output without validating the quality of that output. The result is a vast sea of crap masquerading as the truth.
How often is a scientist given the job of vetting another's work? So how often do you suppose it happens? And how much do you suppose it's worth to a scientist to participate in validating the truth, and how much to participate in publishing over validating?
Most of the people who claim that HIV doesn't cause AIDS haven't bothered to do much reading either. Read these online articles, which actually give a complete list of citations which you can then explore:
The Relationship between HIV and AIDS
The vidence that HIV causes AIDS
As for the "prominent scientists", some of them are operating waaaay outside their area of expertise. Kary Mullis had one brilliant discovery and doesn't seem to have done much else, aside from taking acid and surfing. One particularly loud denier that I know of is actually a math professor known for his aggressive crusades against anyone holding opinions contrary to him. He was once caught making a bold claim about media coverage of AIDS that was quickly proved wrong by a reporter with LEXIS/NEXIS access.
I'm a PhD student in Literature (I know...) and although there's definitely a bit of a problem in the Humanities with people not responding to others in a useful dialogue at times, and there is certainly the same "publish or perish" imperative, it is really a *huge* faux pas to not have read the entirity of the paper/book you cite. In my field, you can easily be discredited for your entire academic carrer for that sort of thing.
Incidentally, it seems to me that the peer review process that exists in both the humanities and the sciences ought to catch these people who are completely misreading their source material. If neither the people writing the papers nor the reviewers are familiar with secondary materials, a real problem exists.
"I do not fear computers. I fear the lack of them." -Isaac Asimov
It's standard (though often unwritten) practice for many journals to require that any article they accept for publication have a minimum number of citations from previous articles in the same journal. These citations are counted in academic listings such as the ISI reports. Quoting from their website: "It presents quantifiable statistical data that provides a systematic, objective way to determine the relative importance of journals within their subject categories."
Not if researchers are adding extraneous notes to their article at the publisher's command!
ancarett, historian and zombie gamer
The alternative, which academic science really doesn't like, is to not cite the papers you read. See Wolfram's latest where he clearly reads much but cites *nothing*. Perhaps that's really what he means by a "new kind of science."
only infrmatn esentil to understandn mst b tranmitd
In the field of computer science, this problem is probably less pronounced. Several resources make it very easy to read papers, so access is not much of an issue. These resources include CiteSeer and the ACM Digital Library, which contain vast databases of computer science publications in electronic form.
No, we don't always read the papers we cite. But scientists don't need to read the entire papers: we just look at the figures and then the methods to see how the data was produced.
For anything which is of secondary importance in a paper that scientists write, we may not read the entire paper. For example, introductory material. I've put a review article of aging and the brain in my journal, which has inroductory material on free radicals and anti-oxidants. I, however, haven't read the entire papers discussing free radicals and anti-oxidants. I've simply skimmed for what was relevant.
For anything of primary importance to what we write about, we usually at least read the abstract, figures, and methods. The results section is simply a written description of the figures, and the discussion section usually covers things that we can figure out for ourselves from looking at the figures. Considering that the average paper consists of around 50 references and that the average review article consists of around 100 or more referen ces, this is proper and acceptable procedure, imo.
What is not proper and acceptable, imo, is to simply read the abstract of a paper and then assume that the conclusions they say are correct, or to read something out of a review article and trust that that's correct without looking at the primary paper's figures/methods. Abstracts and review articles are very useful for finding key information quickly, but they should never be trusted without verifying by examining the figures from the primary paper.
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen
The logic benind the articel is very, very weak. The basis of the article is that misquotes in citations (wrong volume, page number etc.) propagate from one paper to another. Whech shows that the authors cut-and-pasted citations from earlier papers. Sure. But the researchers quoted claim that this means that the researchers didn't read the papers concerned. Rubbish.
During the reserch shage of a project, you read the papers. Error in th citation - no sweat; you know authers and title, and a search engine will give it to you in nothing flat.
Weeks or months later, it is writeup time. Open the first paper to cite it. And there are all the other references you followed (a little trouble in the lookup is long forgotten) and dutifully read. And - get this - it is easier to cut-and-past the citation than to go back to the paper and assemble - separately - the publication, title, authors and page numbers.
Then only thing the research quoted proves is that papers are overwhelmingly circulated electronically ans the dead tree format is, for scientific papers, obsolete.
Consciousness is an illusion caused by an excess of self consciousness.
Like many posters before me, I've had first hand experience of this sort.
... even when the original article had been read! Moreover, academics who use LaTeX and BibTeX often share their BibTeX file ... so citation errors can propogate that way as well ...
But I think we're jumping the gun: I once miscited a paper that I had actually read several times. I copied the citation from the reference section of a different paper I had on hand. [I got the name of the "lesser" co-author wrong; the article was very strongly identified with the lead author]
This is not that uncommon among my academic colleagues: we usually keep one article around (typically a survey article) purely as a citation reference. A citation error in that article can lead to many similar citation errors in other articles
The UCLA study assumes that people who propogate similar citations errors failed to read the actual article when in fact we can only infer that they had copied that citation from the original faulty article.
Although this is an interesting study, I think the citation problem is still of a lower order of magnitude than the "let's fudge some experimental results" problem.
- Historical references. A few articles, from 1943, 1949, 1958, 1969, 1975, 1977, and so on, cited with roughly: "The history of
... can be traced far back to the times of birth of the digital computers (Xx 1943, Yy 1949). There was some research done [about the topic] in the fifties and sixties (Zz 1958, Ww 1969). ... The idea of X was first introduced by Y in 1960s..." I couldn't find the original articles easily any longer, but they are cited similarly in about every introductory book on the topic, and they are really very generic references and don't contain anything interesting. They are only to give credit: "This book dealt with this first and gave this general idea, which is commonly known in the field." And there's no technical details in the books that would be needed.
- Irrelevant references. One reference was the original source of a simple function, which I got from a friend, who gave also the original reference. The original article was totally unimportant, because the simple and basicly arbitrary function generated some test data and didn't have any deeper meaning. A few other such references contained the original descriptions of certain benchmarking data sets that have been used in thousands of studies. The meaning of the data was totally unimportant to me.
- One technical article, which I couldn't find from anywhere. The method described in the article was described in numerous other articles and books, but I guess it's always possible that they were not perfectly accurate. Maybe I trusted too much, I don't know. Somewhat irrelevant though, as I implemented a variant (see below).
You judge me. I don't bother.This is not to say citing unread references is generally good. It should be avoided, although perhaps not at any cost -- getting all possible historical and elementary books can be costly and time-consuming in proportion to the actual benefit. Nevertheless, I've too often seen people implement a method, but not quite the same way as the original author, and still talk about it as it was the original method. In such cases, I'd recommend circumventing the problem by saying: "We used a variant of the method presented by X." and making sure it has implementation details that the original article could not possibly have had.
It's all about how you say it.
Look, as someone who's written scientific papers, the claims in the article are not only false, but indicative of poor science themselves. They're making the classic experimental stats mistake. Namely, copying and pasting citations from other sources is *absolutely uncorrelated* with whether those papers have been read by the author.
i es
Formatting citations is fussy, tedious, and annoying. You have to look up the page numbers in the journal (which you may not even have in these days of online papers), figure out who the publisher was, the issue or journal number.
I read every single one of the papers I've ever cited. But it was rare that I ever typed in a citation from scratch. Usually you get them either from an on-line citation database, from the bibtex entry helpfully supplied on the cited author's web page (scientists like being cited!) or, yes, by typing out a citation from a printed paper.
In any given field, usually some kind-hearted soul starts collecting a database of citations for others to use. For instance, here's one here:
http://www.helios32.com/resources.htm#Bibliograph
Have a look; you'll soon twig to why people don't type these in from scratch.
Creating the citation all over from scratch when it's right there in front of you is about as pointless as adding a link to a web page by retyping some monstrous 200-character URL. Just because you copy & pasted a link doesn't mean you didn't read the article did you? (I guess slashdot is the wrong place for that particular piece of rhetoric.)
I'm disappointed in New Scientist. The pissy little diatribe about science in the story submission is par for the course. Please, leave the pontificating to people who have a clue.
In fact, how about a retraction? (Ha ha ha ha!)
A.
There is ungodly profit potential in medical "science", and research physicians and similar types will do almost anything to make a buck, or many hundreds of thousands of bucks, from big pharmaceutical companies and so forth. My perspective comes from years in the medical industry.
To paraphrase James Carville, it's amazing what happens when you drag a $100 bill through a research hospital. These folks will make stuff up for money. Some of them deal in half truths -- they'll play clever games with the truth to support things that they know to be nonsense. Others just make stuff up out of whole cloth.
Some people in the field are good -- but there are many others for who you'd be well advised to count your fingers after shaking their hand to make sure they gave 'em all back.
Have you tried interlibrary loan? You can, for a very small fee, get photocopies of articles from journals other libraries subscribe to. I used to do that all the time while in college. You can actually get full books as well. If you are referencing articles in a paper but don't read them simply because they weren't in your library then that is very deceitful. Further it is problematic scientifically since you are ignoring a possibly significant piece of evidence. What if the paper in question undercut some of your methodology? You'd never know. . .
A lot of /.er's don't RTFA either.
C|N>K
Then, we are not told to read this article, but are instead referred to a New Scientist (!) blurb that gives you the gist of it. If this irony is intentional then it's pretty clever! In any case, I think an interesting point has been made.
The Volokh Conspiracy has a a number of good posts on this subject by Juan Non-Volokh, Sasha Volokh, and Orin Kerr.
I won't repeat here what they have to say, but would like to add my own observation. Student law review editors (like the lawyers and judges they will become) are very good at some things, and not so good at others. They are good at reading everything, a priori deductive logic, and linguistic analysis. At least in law school, the get no training in inductive logic, probability, statitics, the scientific method, or even non-legal "paper" research.
As a result, student law review editors (and again, the lawyers and judges they will become) are very good at catching some errors, and not so good at catching others. An error in deductive logic or the implication of language will be caught. An error in probability, statistics, or scientific method may not.
Only Women Bleed (Sex, Sharia remix)
In atmospheric science everyone worships something called "baroclinic instability" and every paper on the subject dutifully references the two papers by Eady and Charney that started it all.
But for the Eady paper, I've seen it referenced as "E. T. Eady (1949)", "E. J. Eady (1949)", "E. A. Eady (1947)", etc. And since the journal's so old, it took me a while to figure out the guy's real name. I guess very few people have read the actual paper.
Every once in a while I check to see what new papers have come out that cite any of my papers.
I've had a couple of mine get cited for reasons which were not at all the main ideas in them. E.g. one got cited just so they could quote one phrase which was not at all important, and it seemed silly to cite me just to quote that phrase. But on the other hand, maybe other authors I've cited feel the same way, that I took some idea away from their paper which wasn't at all their main focus.
Yes, that is the tinfoil hat explanation.
Now try this one: authors are human beings who make typos. They cut and paste erroneous references because they don't want to waste time retyping the reference. They read articles from the online versions of journals, and sometimes the citation info provided online is incorrect or altogether absent.
One thing that does disgust me is the explosion in the number of footnotes associated with a typical academic paper these days. I recently submitted a paper with a not-particularly-important result to a not-very-important journal, and the paper had forty-one footnotes. (Most were added by my coauthor.) If you visit an mature university library, pull out a copy of an older periodical. Copies of Philosophical Transactions from the nineteenth century are a delight to read. I read a paper by Kelvin from (IIRC) 1807, and it had seven references. Seven!
The growth of massive, searchable databases of papers (eg Medline) has led to many more footnotes per paper, and many more potential typos. For the record, the paper I mentioned above contained at least three errors in the footnotes that were noted and corrected by the journal publisher. Perhaps New Scientist should be writing a scathing expose on the decline of proofreading and rise of profligate namedropping in footnotes.
~Idarubicin
I also have never known a slashdotter to read an article that they have an opinion on. Wisdom takes time, ignorance is immediate!
Which is something I think Calvin and Hobbes, or Dilbert, or Foxtrot or some other comic strip came up with...I am going to go with Calvin and Hobbes
--Joey
...that tolerates sloppy writing and even outright fraud in science, and it's not new.
In the 1960's, I was informed that a biology prof at a California state university was telling his undergrad classes that a female gorilla had been articifically inseminated with human semen and had subsequently given birth to a live baby--half ape, half human. I was astounded that anyone would perpetrate such a hoax, and eventually not only had an interview with the hoaxer, but corresponded with many biologists, zoologists and institutes in an effort to prove that his (shifting) sources were sheer inventions.
My point: as I tried to bring up the issue of academic ethics and scientific responsibility, I was shocked to discover that no one wanted to deal with this hoax. The prof stuck to his story, and his colleagues avoided comment and involvement. In fact I was warned to shut up and stop making waves. The scientific community was upset with ME.
There is no happy ending to this story of hoax and lies and disgraceful cover-up. The scientific community is, IMHO, unwilling to police itself adequately; it is sloppy, lacking in stringent ethical guidelines, and lethargic. That's a generalization that doubtless has exceptions.
I was able to establish that the hoax was not a teaching technique. The lies seemed to have been part of an effort by the prof to discredit political figures: he evidently wanted to show that because of the nature of the "research," creationists had used political pressure to cut funding for the program.
The hoaxer has a Ph. D. from the University of Southern California, which means...nothing. Back in the 1960's, I thought that an advanced degree was not only an academic accomplishment, but also a kind of certification as to the ethics of a researcher. How naive I was.
So this story about sloppy writing comes as no surprise at all. I believe that if more research were done into the ethics of researchers, a lot of nasty things would be exposed. Scientists are not demi-gods--some are rascals, and many of those who are not have a distressing tendency to tolerate sloppy research and even blatant hoaxes.
This wasn't a hick lawyer either.. She was senior partner in one of the largest law firms in BC, had a reputation for never losing a case, and became a judge a year or so later (Judgeship is more of a peer-review process in Canada than it appears to be in the US).
This left me with a feeling that lawyers don't pay as much attention to their authorities as they could. Probably more so than scientists do with their citations.
OS Software is like love: The best way to make it grow is to give it away.
To me, the bare minimum is that you have to read the paper if you want your name on it. If not, then how to you know what's going out under your own name?
Find free books.
See Sig, Many who have looked "science" from the research side will agree with it. Now there is mare hard evidence to prove what some of us have known all along. Science is about politics, money, ego, greed, fame, and discovery gets the short shift. Sometime it's the people, sometimes it's the system. Either way it sucks when the truth takes second spot to any of the previously mentioned traits that go into "discovery".
Read the sig if you don't know what I'm talking about.
"Science is about ego as much as it is about discovery and truth " - I said it, so sue me.
What people know, they pass their own judgment on
and do not permit it to exercise such an authority.
What they do not know they accept on authority.
(Rudolf Steiner, Warmth Course - Lecture IV)
--
The physicist announces that he explains all phenomena by means
of purely mechanical facts. This causes people to say, "Well,
there are only mechanical facts in space. Life must be a mechanical
thing, soul phenomena must be mechanical and spiritual things must
be mechanical." 'Exact sciences' will not admit the possibility of
a spiritual foundation for the world. And 'exact science' works as
an especially powerful authority because they are not familiar with
it. What people know, they pass their own judgment on and do not
permit it to exercise such an authority. What they do not know they
accept on authority. If more were done to popularize the so-called
'rigidly exact science,' the authority of some of those who sit
entrenched in possession of this exact science would practically
disappear.
(Rudolf Steiner, Warmth Course, Lecture IV,
Stuttgart, March 4th, 1920)
It's hard to pick authors for my papers because so much analysis depends on analysis done by other people on the team. You can't put everyone who worked on a project on the paper, because its considered bad form to have more than 4 authors (some journals limit you to six authors). So the authors are usually just the people stuck with doing the write-up and everyone else is put into the acknowledgements.
On the flip side, I've had some scientist cooleagues want to add me as an author on a paper that I had nothing to do with and I had to find a polite way to get them to take me off of the author list. (Hey, I'm trying to build a reputation for my own work I don't want my name tied to a paper I don't have any say on).
There are 10 types of people in this world, those who can count in binary and those who can't.
I'm not surprised many scientists don't read all the papers they've cited. To be published in a reputable peer review journal, you have to cite other literature. And you have to cite lots of other literature. It's almost like back in high school when the English teacher says, "You must have ten sources." So the scientists do a quick search for vaguely relevant material, and judging by the abstract alone, choose whether to add it in to their cited sources list. That's just the way things are: some journals are hard to come by, and to get some articles you have you pay $20 online per 24 hour period. Now the abstracts are always free. Frankly, I don't blame the scientists. It just reinforces the importance of the abstract. As long as such an emphasis is placed on citing, I think a large emphasis should be placed on abstracts as well.
Cyde Weys Musings - Scrutinizing the inscrutable