Brian wrote:
Danny originally brought this fact up because he is writing a reference book as part of a series of books to be published. Every single one of the statements he made in the book had to have a source. He said it took several months for every one of his facts to be checked against every single source. This is how it works in the world of publishing. We have simply side-stepped this out of laziness, in my opinion.
This may happen with some higher-profile and better-funded works, but I'm also an academic, and I'm quite certain that this isn't normal practice. I know for a fact that MIT Press does not hire CS and Engineering experts to meticulously review every line of the books they publish, for example, and even with textbooks quality-control is often directed primarily by the author (this is part of why there are *always* lengthy lists of errata discovered within a week of a new textbook's release). Even journal peer-review is often much more spot-checking than one might think, with the exception of a few very high-profile (and well-funded) journals like _Nature_ and _Science_.
-Mark