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