{"id":181,"date":"2010-07-09T19:17:34","date_gmt":"2010-07-09T19:17:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/iamslic.dreamhosters.com\/blog\/?p=181"},"modified":"2010-07-09T19:19:49","modified_gmt":"2010-07-09T19:19:49","slug":"one-in-four-citations-in-marine-biology-papers-is-iappropriate","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.iamslic.org\/blog\/?p=181","title":{"rendered":"One in Four Citations in Marine Biology Papers is Inappropriate"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>This is the title of a paper by P.A. Todd et al. in v.408 2010 of <strong><em>Marine Ecology Progress Series<\/em><\/strong>.  The abstract of the paper is below.<\/p>\n<p>Joe Wible<br \/>\nHopkins Marine Station<\/p>\n<p>ABSTRACT: Citing sources that do not support the assertion being made can misinform readers, per- petuate mistakes and deny credit to the researchers who should have been acknowledged. To quan- tify citation fidelity in marine biology, we retrieved 198 papers from 2 recent issues of 33 marine biol- ogy journals. From each paper we randomly selected 1 citation, recovered the source material, and evaluated its appropriateness. We discovered that the assertion was \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcclearly supported\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 by the cita- tion in only 75.8% of cases, the support was \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcambiguous\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 in 10.6% of cases and the citation offered \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcno support\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 to the original statement in 6.0% of cases. The remaining 7.6% of cases were classified as \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcempty\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 (citations to secondary sources). We found no relationship between citation appropriate- ness and the position of the assertion in the paper, number of authors, number of references, article length and Journal Impact Factor. That 1 in 4 citations in marine biology should be viewed with scep- ticism is alarming and has important ramifications for both scholarship and bibliometrics.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>This is the title of a paper by P.A. Todd et al. in v.408 2010 of Marine Ecology Progress Series. The abstract of the paper is below. Joe Wible Hopkins Marine Station ABSTRACT: Citing sources that do not support the assertion being made can misinform readers, per- petuate mistakes and deny credit to the researchers [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[3],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.iamslic.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/181"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.iamslic.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.iamslic.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.iamslic.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.iamslic.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=181"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.iamslic.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/181\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.iamslic.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=181"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.iamslic.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=181"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.iamslic.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=181"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}