1 May

In 2010, Google estimated that approximately 130M books had been published.

As a species, we still know very little about the world. But what we know already far exceeds what any of us can learn in a lifetime.

Scientists are acutely aware of the point. They must specialize, as chances of learning all the key facts about anything but the narrowest of the domains are slim. They must also resort to shorthand to communicate what is known and what is new. The shorthand that they use is—citations. However, this vital building block of science is often rife with problems. The three key problems with how scientists cite are:

1. Cite in an imprecise manner. This broad claim is supported by X. Or, our results are consistent with XYZ. (Our results are consistent with is consistent with directional thinking than thinking in terms of effect size. That means all sorts of effects are consistent, even those 10x as large.) For an example of how I think work should be cited, see Table 1 of this paper.

2. Do not carefully read what they cite. This includes misstating key claims and citing retracted articles approvingly (see here). The corollary is that scientists do not closely scrutinize papers they cite, with the extent of scrutiny explained by how much they agree with the results (see the next point). For a provocative example, see here.)

3. Cite in a motivated manner. Scientists ‘up’ the thesis of articles they agree with, for instance, misstating correlation as causation. And they blow up minor methodological points with articles whose results their paper’s result is ‘inconsistent’ with. (A brief note on motivated citations: here).