Monday, August 1, 2016

AND NOW FOR THE LIGHTER SIDE OF THE NEWS

Check out this Washington Post story [if you have access] according to which academic men cite themselves in their own journal articles fifty to seventy percent more often than do academic women.  You gotta love it.
at

7 comments:

  1. JonAugust 1, 2016 at 12:58 PM

    Given how much Martha Nussbaum publishes and how often she cites herself, this report probably understates the gap between male and female academics.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Robert Paul WolffAugust 1, 2016 at 1:04 PM

    now, now.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Charles PigdenAugust 1, 2016 at 9:25 PM

    I plead guilty to self-citation but when I am bragging about my citation count (which is something I am sometimes professionally obliged to do ) I exclude the self-cites. Will that get me from Hell into Purgatory?

    And to be fair to Martha Nussbaum quite a lot of her stuff is well worth citing, even by herself.

    ReplyDelete
  4. JonAugust 1, 2016 at 11:09 PM

    Oh, yes, I agree with that last point--especially "Frontiers of Justice." I suppose I was unjustly venting because I've had a particularly frustrating experience with her work (though not just hers), where she'll be making an argument, import some unproven assumption, and append to it a citation to another of her works. I think to myself, "OK! I'll go read that and then I'll understand why she thinks that assumption is justified." But when I follow up the citation, the same assumption is, indeed, asserted there, but once again not proven. This has happened to me enough that, when I see her cite herself, I kind of roll my eyes. But sorry if I introduced unwelcome vitriol into your comments section with what was intended to be a harmless joke. Feel free to delete the whole thing.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Tom CathcartAugust 2, 2016 at 11:00 AM

    My academic wife Eloise says, "I'm shocked. Shocked!"

    ReplyDelete
  6. mesnenorAugust 2, 2016 at 11:14 AM

    The most demented form of the argumentum ad verecundiam I've ever seen is the unique variant developed by Ayn Rand. In her ostensibly "philosophical" essays, she will back up her points by quoting speeches made by the fictional characters in her own novels.

    Wheels within wheels of insanity.

    ReplyDelete
  7. Robert Paul WolffAugust 2, 2016 at 11:20 AM

    Nice. I suppose that is what you would expect from someone who purports to deduce all of her conclusions from the proposition "A=A."

    ReplyDelete