sey075

I find myself rarely scrolling through the news feed on Academia.edu any more. I used to like to review the articles listed, often finding things of interest. But there are two new developments in their algorithms that make my news feed almost painful to read. First, the same articles are listed over and over again. Someone posted a paper: it is listed, Someone bookmarked the paper: listed again. Someone recommended the paper: listed again. Someone looked at the paper. Someone sneezed at the paper. Someone whispered its title. It is bad enough having to wade through the same papers over and over again. But it is made much worse by the second problem Second, I now get all sorts of papers listed that I don't have the least interest in. Postcolonial this, materiality theory that, phenomenology here, conceptions of the body there. Ugh, I really don't care about this stuff. I used to tweak my list of interests to keep out this kind of fluff, but now it is all over my Academia.edu fe...

In my paper on arguments in archaeology ( Smith, Michael E.,  2015,  How can Archaeologists Make Better Arguments? The SAA Archaeological Record 15(4):18-23 ) I mention the problem of empty citations. A comment this weekend on Twitter got me to look again at the basic reference on empty citations: Harzing, Anne-Wil 2002 Are our referencing errors undermining our scholarship and credibility? The case of expatriate failure rates. Journal of Organizational Behavior 23:127-148. Harzing lists "12 guidelines for good academic referencing." I listed these in an earlier post in 2008 . They bear repeating, so here they are: Reproduce the correct reference. This means get the details of the citation right. Refer to the correct publication. For example, do not cite Binford (1972) for something that was in fact said in Binford (1965). Do not use “empty” references. “Empty references do not contain any original data for the phenomenon under investigation, but strictly refer to other ...