Carl Beckhorn wrote:
On Mon, Jan 05, 2009 at 11:11:55PM -0800, Delirium wrote:
I think it's perfectly applicable to journal articles as well. I personally, at least, think it's usually inappropriate to directly cite a new-research result to the journal article, since evaluating journal articles, and placing them in proper historical and disciplinary context is itself a quite difficult bit of original research.
That sort of research is usually known as "writing" and is what we are supposed to use talk pages to discuss. Mark already hits on the main point in his next quote: what is appicable to medical articles may not be applicable to mathematics articles (and physical science articles will have their own issues, and so on).
One thing to keep in mind as we move forward in this discussion is that analysis of sources is only "original reasearch" in the sense of WP:NOR if the analysis is actually included in the text of the article, or is implicit in the arguments there. In order to assess the due weight and neutral point of view for various topics, we have to consider the historical and disciplinary context of our sources using our broader knowledge of the subject. This is research in some sense, but it is not prohibited in any way.
I agree that *some* amount of original research is impossible in any sort of writing that involves synthesis, and I also agree with you that this varies by disciplines. I'd say most of the problems with directly citing journal articles to construct novel summaries of a topic have happened in medical, historical, and political articles, which has driven some of the policy developement. That's particularly problematic because in, say, history, synthesis of sources is basically what research in the field *is*. But I'd also be skeptical of a general mathematical article, on something like [[calculus]] or [[statistics]], which was constructed mostly from journal articles.
Especially with overview articles, secondary or tertiary sources provide not only citations for specific facts, but citations that give evidence for something really being consensus in a field, or considered an important issue in a field. Just a bunch of primary source references isn't really verifiable in the sense that I can track down the references and thereby be confident in the article's accuracy, because I have no idea why these references were selected out of the thousands of journal papers written every year, whether they are representative of the field, whether they're a highly biased subset, etc. So I'd be skeptical if our [[calculus]] article had an impeccably cited section on a part of calculus that no textbook or widely cited survey saw fit to mention.
I guess I tend to view it mostly pragmatically, looking to see if a particular use of sources jumps out at me as likely to be due to someone trying to push a novel theory or not. The skepticism goes up when there are in fact already a number of secondary or tertiary sources---then I wonder why the article author felt it necessary to write their own novel overview of the subject directly from the primary literature, rather than referring to any of the extant ones.
-Mark