On Tue, Aug 9, 2011 at 6:10 PM, Gwern Branwen <gwern0(a)gmail.com> wrote:
"Brain Diving: The Ghost with the Most" by
Brain Ruh, _ANN_
http://www.animenewsnetwork.com/brain-diving/2011-08-09
> ...However, this puts books like Drazen's in
an odd predicament. It's not really an academic book, since it lacks the references
and theories something like that would entail, which means it's not a good candidate
for a university press.
My rule of thumb for self-published sources is to see if they cite
their sources. If they do, then you can check what they say. If they
don't, then you can't, and that can be a problem even with so-called
'reliable' sources. The best measure of reliability after a really
reputable name and publisher and reputation, is citing of sources
(there is a reason why this is done, after all). So much so, that when
I buy (or browse) books that I might consider useful for Wikipedia
editing, the first thing I do is look at the back to see how good the
references are (if there are any). If there are none, I may buy
(borrow if in a library) the book anyway as something of interest, but
would be far less likely to use it for Wikipedia editing.
Carcharoth