Sunday, June 19, 2016

Academic urban legends

Academic urban legends

Abstract

Many of the messages presented in respectable scientific publications are, in fact, based on various forms of rumors. Some of these rumors appear so frequently, and in such complex, colorful, and entertaining ways that we can think of them as academic urban legends. The explanation for this phenomenon is usually that authors have lazily, sloppily, or fraudulently employed sources, and peer reviewers and editors have not discovered these weaknesses in the manuscripts during evaluation. To illustrate this phenomenon, I draw upon a remarkable case in which a decimal point error appears to have misled millions into believing that spinach is a good nutritional source of iron. Through this example, I demonstrate how an academic urban legend can be conceived and born, and can continue to grow and reproduce within academia and beyond.
Bauerlein et al. (2010) claim that we are currently experiencing an ‘avalanche of low-quality research’, and academia has become an environment where ‘[a]spiring researchers are turned into publish-or-perish entrepreneurs, often becoming more or less cynical about the higher ideals of the pursuit of knowledge’. Whether the current state of affairs is better or worse than before, it seems reasonable to assume that corner-cutting is an unfortunate side effect of publication pressure and competition for academic positions and scarce resources, especially in milieus where counting publications is more important than reading and evaluating them. In this article, I explore a particular set of corner-cutting techniques that reveal much about strategies of reading, writing, and citation, as well as the development of academic urban legends.

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