JAWRA Blog » citations

Importance of Trusted Sources

Ken Lanfear — Sat, 22 Jan 2011 22:34:16 +0000

In today’s New York Times, Keven M. Leven offers an opinion, “Teaching Civil War History 2.0,” concerning an outrageously wrong fourth-grade history text used by the Commonwealth of Virginia. The textbook author, not a professional historian, apparently gathered her information through an online search. Mr. Leven provides an excellent explanation of the pitfalls of depending upon such unvalidated information sources. He explains that one of the most valuable lessons for students is how to search and how to evaluate sources. He warns, “The Internet is both a goldmine of information as well as a minefield of misinformation and distortion.”

Good reading!

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Citations of JAWRA in Literature Cited

Ken Lanfear — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 22:18:56 +0000

We are rethinking how JAWRA articles are presented in the “Literature Cited” section. Current practice is to include volume, issue and pages in the citation, as, for example,”46(1):17-28″. This venerable format may be coming to the end of its useful life.

First of all, we’re publishing more Featured Collections. The articles in such collections often refer to others in the same issue. Since the authors obviously don’t know page numbers until layout is complete, we have to go back in and make adjustments almost literally at the last minute. (Ask me how I spent this Wednesday afternoon!) Besides the work and inconvenience, there’s plenty of potential for error here.

Secondly, page numbers are almost useless for the online version. And, anyone with the printed journal in hand can easily look up the article in the table of contents.

Looming in the wings in an obvious candidate for addition: the Digital Object Identifier (DOI). This funny sequence of numbers is an international standard, a unique identifier and pointer to the online version. See an earlier post explaining the DOI.

One proposal we’re considering is to include only issue and volume and to add the DOI.

Comments?

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Citing Data Bases

Ken Lanfear — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 20:54:43 +0000

The new Instructions for Authors make significant changes in how to cite data bases. Previously, we tried (not quite successfully) to treat data bases as formal references. Since it can be difficult to identify the “author,” much less give a year of “publication” for an ongoing data base, this led to a lot of strange citations. Recognizing the futility of this approach, we decided to treat data bases as informal references. The key point, after all, is to make it easy to declare where one got their data! The less specific informal reference structure gives authors more freedom to direct users precisely to the data source.

Data sources should be specified with enough detail to lead a qualified researcher to an appropriate starting point in the data base. Dates of access may be given approximately or as a range, to help resolve any future updates in the source. Some examples of common data bases are given below. You may designate a “default” source for groups of data, as in the second example:

(U.S. Geological Survey, National Water Information System. Accessed December 8, 2008, http://waterdata.usgs.gov/nwis.)

(U.S. Geological Survey, National Water Information System. Accessed June, 2007 – December, 2008, http://waterdata.usgs.gov/nwis. Unless otherwise noted all streamflow data in this paper are from this source.)

(U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, 2008. STORET. Accessed December, 2008, http://www.epa.gov/storet/.)

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Citations

Ken Lanfear — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 01:00:17 +0000

Our new Instructions for Authors proposes to make a clear distinction between formal citations and informal references.

Published Literature, or formal citations, includes published materials available to future researchers. All entries have an author/compiler/editor/manager (person or organization), a date of publication, and title and publishing information to uniquely identify the materials. Contractor reports to a public agency fall in this category if they can be clearly and uniquely identified.

Informal References includes everything else: personal communications (letters, notes, and conversations), unpublished reports, legal citations, and data bases. More on data bases will appear in a later post.

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.