I really liked this blog post and have often considered this point myself. He mentions that undergraduates often find the process of looking up primary sources to be a waste of time, which is probably not far from the truth. This is further compounded by the fact that students usually follow textbooks that summarize wide arrays of previous work and are rarely encouraged to seek the original sources cited in such texts. This begins not in college, but for many students in high school where they review Cliff’s Notes rather than read novels assigned in English class. It took me some time as an undergraduate to truly appreciate the value of reading primary sources and probably wasn’t until writing my senior thesis that I fully appreciated the need to do so. I believe that not fully understanding the results of complicated studies when they were summarized in a sentence or less was what led me at the time to pursue original sources rather than any higher need to satisfy scientific integrity.
Having gone through that process though, I can now fully appreciate the need to, at the very least, confirm the original source is properly represented. If this step is skipped something akin to the game of “telephone” occurs. The original author reports one thing, the next interprets the work as another, that interpretation is further re-interpreted and so on and so forth. There is no way of knowing that the author of the paper you are reading has actually read the sources they are citing or simply cited them from what they read summarized elsewhere. The only way to cite with confidence is to read directly that which you cite.
I really liked this blog post and have often considered this point myself. He mentions that undergraduates often find the process of looking up primary sources to be a waste of time, which is probably not far from the truth. This is further compounded by the fact that students usually follow textbooks that summarize wide arrays of previous work and are rarely encouraged to seek the original sources cited in such texts. This begins not in college, but for many students in high school where they review Cliff’s Notes rather than read novels assigned in English class. It took me some time as an undergraduate to truly appreciate the value of reading primary sources and probably wasn’t until writing my senior thesis that I fully appreciated the need to do so. I believe that not fully understanding the results of complicated studies when they were summarized in a sentence or less was what led me at the time to pursue original sources rather than any higher need to satisfy scientific integrity.
ReplyDeleteHaving gone through that process though, I can now fully appreciate the need to, at the very least, confirm the original source is properly represented. If this step is skipped something akin to the game of “telephone” occurs. The original author reports one thing, the next interprets the work as another, that interpretation is further re-interpreted and so on and so forth. There is no way of knowing that the author of the paper you are reading has actually read the sources they are citing or simply cited them from what they read summarized elsewhere. The only way to cite with confidence is to read directly that which you cite.