Carl Beckhorn wrote:
On Mon, Jan 05, 2009 at 11:11:55PM -0800, Delirium
wrote:
I think it's perfectly applicable to journal
articles as well. I
personally, at least, think it's usually inappropriate to directly cite
a new-research result to the journal article, since evaluating journal
articles, and placing them in proper historical and disciplinary context
is itself a quite difficult bit of original research.
That sort of research is usually known as "writing" and is what we are
supposed to use talk pages to discuss. Mark already hits on the main
point in his next quote: what is appicable to medical articles may
not be applicable to mathematics articles (and physical science articles
will have their own issues, and so on).
One thing to keep in mind as we move forward in this discussion is that
analysis of sources is only "original reasearch" in the sense of WP:NOR
if the analysis is actually included in the text of the article, or is
implicit in the arguments there. In order to assess the due weight and
neutral point of view for various topics, we have to consider the
historical and disciplinary context of our sources using our broader
knowledge of the subject. This is research in some sense, but it is not
prohibited in any way.
I agree that *some* amount of original research is impossible in any
sort of writing that involves synthesis, and I also agree with you that
this varies by disciplines. I'd say most of the problems with directly
citing journal articles to construct novel summaries of a topic have
happened in medical, historical, and political articles, which has
driven some of the policy developement. That's particularly problematic
because in, say, history, synthesis of sources is basically what
research in the field *is*. But I'd also be skeptical of a general
mathematical article, on something like [[calculus]] or [[statistics]],
which was constructed mostly from journal articles.
Especially with overview articles, secondary or tertiary sources provide
not only citations for specific facts, but citations that give evidence
for something really being consensus in a field, or considered an
important issue in a field. Just a bunch of primary source references
isn't really verifiable in the sense that I can track down the
references and thereby be confident in the article's accuracy, because I
have no idea why these references were selected out of the thousands of
journal papers written every year, whether they are representative of
the field, whether they're a highly biased subset, etc. So I'd be
skeptical if our [[calculus]] article had an impeccably cited section on
a part of calculus that no textbook or widely cited survey saw fit to
mention.
I guess I tend to view it mostly pragmatically, looking to see if a
particular use of sources jumps out at me as likely to be due to someone
trying to push a novel theory or not. The skepticism goes up when there
are in fact already a number of secondary or tertiary sources---then I
wonder why the article author felt it necessary to write their own novel
overview of the subject directly from the primary literature, rather
than referring to any of the extant ones.
-Mark