Steve Bennett wrote:
On 3/22/06, SJ 2.718281828@gmail.com wrote:
- Rearranging, reediting, and excerpting Britannica articles. Several
of the "articles" Nature sent its outside reviewers were only sections of, or excerpts from Britannica entries. Some were cut and pasted together from more than one Britannica article. As a result, Britannica's coverage of certain subjects was represented in the study by texts that our editors never created, approved or even saw.
That seems like a lot of hot air over a small issue. Claiming that their editors "never created, approved or even saw" the particular compilation is really piling on strong words to make an impact. Whereas what they're actually denying is much weaker. Kind of like "I did *not* have sexual relations with that woman..."
Sexual relations between WP and Dame Britannica?? What would the children look like? :-)
Whatever may have prompted Nature to do such careless and sloppy research, it's now time for them to uphold their commitment to good science and retract the study immediately. We have urged them strongly to do so.
Uh, a commitment to good science would be publishing the data and their method so that people can attempt to reproduce it. I tend to agree that Nature's method was optimistic. Surely more than one reviewer for each article shoul have been appointed...even better would have been an open forum where many experts could pick through each article and argue amongst themselves.
Yes, but peer review has its problems, and that whole process may need to become more wiki-like.
We have prepared a detailed report that describes Britannica's thorough (7,000 words) analysis of the Nature study. I invite you to download it from our Web site at www.eb.com.
A lot of it seems to be "We reject this criticism. We have asked our adviser, and he says we're right." Not exactly convincing stuff. Particularly when they complain that the original study failed to cite sources - and with few exceptions, the EB rebuttal doesn't either.
Example: "Britannica response: We do not accept these criticisms (which are really just one criticism, not two). We have published a revision of this article that retains the emphasis on supersaturation rather than the transitional stage of saturation."
I didn't read their response in great detail, but did anyone find even a single criticism that EB accepted
I also sort of feel that as an attempted model of good science or whatever, EB should not be attacking the entire Nature study as totally "without merit".
I think EB is in deep trouble, and the result is likely to be the eventual collapse of this 18th cetury institution. That's sad.
Ec