On 10/19/06, MacGyverMagic/Mgm macgyvermagic@gmail.com wrote:
Self-published books aren't neccesarily bad sources either. I've heard about 2 guys who are writing a jazz encyclopedia and publishing it on Lulu. It might be a self-published source, but it won't promote their opinion. I'd see no harm in using their work as a source and I'm sure I'd have the same feelings with other self-published books.
If it is self-published by recognized authorites in a field, I don't see anything wrong with using it as a source, absolutely. Broad categories of anything shouldn't be treated as automatically good or bad. That's the problem, people aren't making these kinds of distinctions and instead are acting like, as David Gerard put it, "insane robots" mechanically repeating a sentence from a policy page.