On Tue, Jan 06, 2009 at 02:14:52PM -0500, WJhonson(a)aol.com wrote:
When a secondary source brings forth a statement, it
can be balanced
by a primary source. What would be wrong would be to present a
brand-new claim directly from a primary source, which no secondary
source mention whatsoever.
What would you make of decades-old papers that are well known and
accepted by everyone in the area, but not covered by review texts
because nobody feels a need to do so? This is the situation with much
mathematical research. It's simply impossible to include every fact
about a topic in a text, so the author chooses a certain perspective and
set of topics. Results that don't fit are left out.
More briefly: the assumption that all journal papers include contingent
results or experimental data that might be invalidated later is not
correct.
"The Neutrino has no mass. In other news,
it's been recently found
that the neutrino is made of Spam."
The only difficulty here is that the "made of Spam" claim should be
attributed to the authors:
"The Neutrino has no mass. Jones and Jones (2009) have recently
published a paper in which they claim the Neutrino is made of Spam."
That is assuming that the Jones/Jones result is of interest to people
in the field and not just a crank paper of some sort. For example, if
they published their paper in Science, that would be a sign it is of
interest.
As another example, if some new researcher claimed to have verified
[[cold fusion]] and published in a respected peer reviewed journal, we
could certainly include that in the article even if no other source had
commented on it - but with appropriate attribution.
This is assuming that all journal papers are actually primary sources in
the NOR sense, of course. My own position is that NOR makes non-experimental
papers "secondary sources", and in those cases there is no issue.
- Carl