Tuesday, February 5, 2008

BTR820 Lecture 6

How do we Evaluate an Article?
  • how famous is the author
  • how often are is the author cited by others
  • where do they work
  • where was it published
- use scholar.google.com
- 25 citations is very very good
- 10 is acceptable
- 0 is shady

Sometimes really really bad papers get cited a lot (as examples of what not to do)
younger papers get cited less

It is a common occurrence for a scholar to get excited about something outside their field and write a paper about it.

wikipedia is biased
sometimes journals are biased too. Alan Sokal published a "joke" paper and it got published (he put in enough physics jargon and wrote to the political views of the journal)

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