Blog #3 – (Wagstaff, Weir, Western Libraries, Antelman, Beall, Kolata, Goldacre)

Going through these readings has reaffirmed, but also clarified, my strategy for approaching articles. Both the Weir text and the Western Libraries video give concise strategies. Read the abstract, introduction, and conclusion first. If it still is relevant proceed with the full text. The Western Libraries video also makes a good point about re-reading the entire thing if it has turned out to be a good source for you. In the past I have done something similar, though not so purposefully. Typically I read some of the introduction and conclusion first before skimming the article. Rarely in the past have I read the abstract, so having been through these materials, as well as some of our previous readings about preparing annotations, I will be sure to pay attention to them. It will also be helpful I think, in knowing when to stop. I imagine that for a great many articles I will not get to the “re-read” step, I won’t be including them in my bibliography anyway.

A Weir quote that really hit me was “Quite a few aren’t even that -- they’re mercenaries fulfilling an assignment and it’s our job to bring them back safely.” In this sentence he’s talking about college students doing some homework that involves reading an article and I thought it was such a perfect description that it deserved a little more discussion. Describing a student as a mercenary really cuts to the quick of where the motivation lies. Does the student actually have any skin in the game? Are the just there for the paycheck (grade)? What has the teacher invested in all of this and why is it important to them? Given the researcher-for-hire mentality I think it might be a little easier to see why some students really don’t put their best foot forward. It’s not their battle, maybe they’d rather take another job.

The Wagstaff provided some good background on scholarly journals in general, which I mostly had no idea about. I was surprised to read the most of them have not been around for very long. Prior to reading it I would have assumed that most professional journals were approaching, or past, their centennial. I was not surprised that there are journals on just about every subject under the sun.

Antelman’s discussion of open access research seemed reasonable and timely. As we are beginning to do our research more and more the full text of papers are available online. It seems totally reasonable to me that the papers that are easier to access will be cited more. As we discussed in class if you can search the text of a document on your device the process of using it will be much easier. There is also the convenience factor. If everything I need is available online then I don’t need to use my time travelling to libraries, waiting for ILLs or searching through physical stacks. Everything is right as my fingertips. A related idea is whether having more full texts available online, through online only journals and researchers’ personal websites results in a higher or lower quality of information.

The next two articles, Beall and Kolata, discuss authors and organizations deliberately posting misinformation but I’m wondering about something less malicious. With full text articles being “self-published” is there going to be more science out there that is “OK, but not great?” More duplicated studies where one is clearly better, but the other isn’t necessarily wrong. I’m imagining that the end result for readers might be that it becomes relatively easy to find something that you’re looking for, but finding the very best work, might become impossible. I relate this to self publishing in music that is perhaps similar, but a little ahead of this curve. Record companies used to filter all the music that was out there. For better or for worse they selected what would be made available. I think by and large they limited us to some of the best music choices. Of course they missed some too. Now, though on Bandcamp or Spotify or Pandora there can be so much music it’s overwhelming. Where do you go to find what is truly the best?

The Beall and Kolata articles in the own right point out a depressing fact about people. Some of us will try to cheat to get ahead. Unfortunately this is true. Beall advocates that the profession as a whole needs to maintain ethical standards to get out of this quandary. That sounds like me telling my class of 11-year-olds to grow up and behave. It’s not that I’ve never done it (I have) but I certainly haven’t seen it work. There needs to be a system put in place that discourages this behavior, rewards following the correct channels, and punishes those who cheat. It will take time and effort to develop. This sounds like a very difficult problem to solve. The Goldacre video that comes on the heels of these is related, but not the same. Almost the opposite in fact, it seems like it ought to be illegal for companies to withhold information in the way that he’s describing. It probably is, but perhaps very difficult to prove for legal reasons. At the beginning of the talk he makes some great points about checking the credibility of your sources. The internet guru who is a fraud with a mail-order degree. Websites that sensationalize news for the sake of money, and “scientific articles” that do cite real reliable science but then blow the conclusions completely out of proportion, or take them way out of context. All of these issues have a thread of truth-seeking running through them. As we go about our research it will be necessary to keep all of this in mind and think critically about what we are reading.