From R&D Magazine
(scroll down to More R&D, fewer citings)

"We" complain when, for example, HBers use the Internet as their only source of information. Maybe they are not the only ones.

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At night the stars put on a show for free (Carole King)

One Earth, One Sky - IYA 2009

from my own experience at universities (1999-2004),
the reason we're now seeing fewer citations or references,
and more recent ones dominating,
is because that's how the students were taught to do it ...

assignments set with upper word limits, ranging from 2000 - 3000 words,
and even being told outright to limit references to 3 for a given assignment ...
student marks penalised for exceeding the word or citation limits,
even for researching deeper than required ...

what did they think would happen when these students graduated?

it has nothing to do with the internet ...

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Great, Taylorism in the class room, publish or perish in the teaches lounge, and the author list (collaborators in the research) is longer than the list of citations. Well, as one who has been hoping all the old literature would be digitized and available and pay walls would go away, I guess I shouldn't hold my breath.

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(By the way, I hate it that so many papers in the areas of planetary science and geology are not easily avaiable to the dreaded "non-subscribers". It is like they are screaming at me: "YOU CAN'T HANDLE THE TRUTH". Good, I feel better now.)

I know you are a person who takes his physics seriously, but isn't it said that most great discoveries aren't discovered with "Eureka!" but with, "Hmmm, that's funny." Big Don

I don’t think they care what happens to them after they graduate.

I’ve done some research on a number of important 19th Century science papers that are still quite important today, about issues still being debated today, and I’m constantly amazed that few people I talk to have ever read or even heard of some of the important old original papers. For example, people often talk about the Michelson-Morley experiment, without ever having read the Michelson-Morley papers. Some mention the “ether drag” hypothesis without realizing it should be attributed to Stokes. If told about Stokes, they would have no idea where to go to look up Stokes’ 1844 theory, which was mentioned by Michelson and Morley as possibly being a reason for their “null” result.

I’ve seen others, including professors, say that the Lorentz Transformation didn’t turn up until 1904 (since they saw it in the popular $9.95 Dover paperback that has a reprint of the 1904 paper), but I’ve got a copy of the original 1895 version of the Lorentz Transformation. Most people I’ve talked to don’t even know the 1895 Lorentz book exists.

Some of this stuff is finally being posted on websites on the internet, so within another 15 or 20 years maybe it will be more available.

But in the meantime the latest important papers tend to be locked up with high fees placed on them by the Journals that own their copyrights. You either have to pay a fee to subscribe to each of the journals or you have to pay each journal an outrageous per-paper fee that can range from $28 to $58 dollars per paper. In some cases, if you can find a large university library that carries back issues of specific journals, you might be able to order a photocopy of specific articles using that method, but it’s time consuming.

So, it just seems to be easier to grab two or three quotes from papers that are in the public domain on the internet and use them for “citations”.

The old papers can be the most fascinating reads. They usually are not trying to impress anyone with their knowledge of jargon within their circle. In a paper I recently read, an author used allochthonus and autochthonus instead of reworked and in situ. I was impressed. My point is that in the old papers they generally will explain their thought process and how they came to the new knowledge that they are presenting. You travel with them. I just hope we do not lose some of the old stuff before it is digitized. Try to get a copy of Ceratopsia by Marsh, Hatcher, Lull. (Now you know what I want for my birthday, or PM me for a longer list)

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(By the way, I hate it that so many papers in the areas of planetary science and geology are not easily avaiable to the dreaded "non-subscribers". It is like they are screaming at me: "YOU CAN'T HANDLE THE TRUTH". Good, I feel better now.)

I know you are a person who takes his physics seriously, but isn't it said that most great discoveries aren't discovered with "Eureka!" but with, "Hmmm, that's funny." Big Don

What they actually are saying is, “If you want this science paper, you’ve got to pay us a lot of money for it.”

That is all they are saying.

There is big money in science today. Fame, fortune, government grants! Think “Gravity Probe B” type grants.

Looks like an original copy of your Ceratopsia runs around $200 and up.

That is correct. And it is one of over two hundred titles on the old wish list; Lottery maybe.

__________________
(By the way, I hate it that so many papers in the areas of planetary science and geology are not easily avaiable to the dreaded "non-subscribers". It is like they are screaming at me: "YOU CAN'T HANDLE THE TRUTH". Good, I feel better now.)

I know you are a person who takes his physics seriously, but isn't it said that most great discoveries aren't discovered with "Eureka!" but with, "Hmmm, that's funny." Big Don

Yeah, the lottery.

Look at this, and it's only 14 pages:

http://www.abebooks.com/servlet/Book...2%26sortby%3D1

Yes, I love those old 19th Century terms.

After I ordered the 1907 Lorentz book of reprints of Doppler’s most famous papers (at a cost of $50 for the book), I discovered that in the first paper Doppler used the terms “Aethertheilchens” and “Wellenschläge”.

After conducting a lot of research about antiquated German science terms, I found out that “Aethertheilchens” means “aether particles” and “Wellenschläge” means “wave impacts”. Thus Doppler actually referred to the “particle” and the “wave” nature of light as early as 1842. Not very many people know that today. Of course I would estimate that not many physicists or physics professors have ever seen a copy of Doppler’s original papers.

Yes, I'll second (or third) that. There is usually a much better explanation of experimental methods. And usually all of the research is in one paper, instead of being spread out over two or three.

You also find some funny things, that show how much things have changed. In my graduate work I referenced a couple of papers about cobalt complexes from the 19th century. I remember one gave, among other properties, the taste of the compound.

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At night the stars put on a show for free (Carole King)

One Earth, One Sky - IYA 2009

indeed ...

equally important, is that the older papers and reports contain the key information - which later authors might only refer to indirectly ...

and which reference and textbooks might only summarise, if you're lucky - or misinterpret, if you're not ...

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I don´t think some loss of erudition is going to be a practical issue for research, especially in the field of hard sciences.

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If you're careful enough, nothing bad or good will ever happen to you.

Google Language tool translates Wellenschläge by itself as "shock wave". What was the context in the article?An in-depth research often turns up some gems.

I've talked about this before. I was investigating a hunch of mine in the nineties and everything pointed to a flurry of papers in the seventies. After reading those, I found they all pointed back to a single seminal geophysics (plate tectonics) paper in the early sixties. The author (singular!) of that paper twice asserted that my hunch was in error, and referred to a paper by Chandrasekhar from the early fifties as support for the assertion. I actually talked to Chandra about it on the phone--he hadn't paid any attention to the subject after 1959--and he agreed the geophysics paper had misinterpreted his results.

PS: Smiley-free posting for the last **004** posts

I'm confused! How is citing the latest papers a negative?

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Any day you wake up on "the right side of the dirt" is a good day.

T. Anderson

Perhaps it would be if you ignore the original papers that the recent ones cited themselves.

I recall my first geology professor insisting we go back to the old stuff to learn about the prevailing theories, even though they'd been refined since then. So, for example, when discussing the impact hypothesis to explain the K/T extinction, we had to read Alvarez, Alvarez, et al (1980). This was in 1994 when the hypothesis had certainly been advanced by then. We read the new stuff too, of course.

Obviously, being up on the latest is a good thing.

However, it can become a chain, and a single link can break the chain. It's not common, but I've seen it more than once.

Another example. I was investigating another case, some remarks about planetary deformation, and I formed a hypothesis. I tracked back through the literature, to see where that hypothesis had been addressed and dismissed. I found some lab results in the seventies, with illustrations of computer simulations from the early sixties. The reproduction of the illustrations was bad, just bad enough to obscure what I was looking for. In other words, it was possible that I might still find it, but anyone looking at those papers could assume that it was not present. Many illustrations since then have copied those illustrations.

I went back to the papers from the sixties. Sure enough, exactly what I was looking for was clearly depicted in the illustrations--the researchers in the seventies must not have felt that particular aspect was important in the reproductions in their own papers.

PS: Smiley-free posting for the last **008** posts

I read the old papers to specifically develop an historcal perspective of the progression from then to now, which is what I am interested in, in the firstplace, and throw in a little dispute or controversey and I'm happy.

__________________
(By the way, I hate it that so many papers in the areas of planetary science and geology are not easily avaiable to the dreaded "non-subscribers". It is like they are screaming at me: "YOU CAN'T HANDLE THE TRUTH". Good, I feel better now.)

I know you are a person who takes his physics seriously, but isn't it said that most great discoveries aren't discovered with "Eureka!" but with, "Hmmm, that's funny." Big Don

According to a physician I know, most medical papers for many years have had bloated references sections, in which authors would throw out everything that had come up in their initial search for articles on the subject, even if it had turned out to be irrelevant to their own work or they hadn't used it or even read it. The idea was to create an impression of thoroughness and depth of investigation of the subject, to boost one's own credibility as an author. He also said that the practice had been rapidly fading in the last few yea