David Goodman wrote:
There are two classes of such meta-sources.
within the world of primary scientific journals, there is citation.
worthless articles are not cited. Of course the notable wrong ones
are, but thats a very small percentage of the nonsense. the test of
acadeic acceptance is not publication, but citation.
and there is the other one that applies for all subjects: the judgment
of reputable secondary and tertiary sources. that usually makes it
unnecessary to go to citations of primary articles as a way of
establishing reliability.
This is really the basic presupposition for RS, and it remains valid.
While I agree with that, there tends to be an infinite regress that
requires someone familiar with a field to make some judgment calls at
some point. Which are the "reputable" secondary and tertiary sources,
for example? Sure, some junk is easy to discard, but in contentious
areas, reputable academic presses will often publish books that are very
much *not* representative of consensus opinion in the area, if they're
from someone prominent in the field, partly because such "dissenter"
monographs tend to sell particularly well.
-Mark