Sources

When teaching intro science labs, TAs were expected to really focus on scientific writing. This is probably good because the labs we led had not changed in a bazillion years and were generally pretty dry. Writing seemed like a good thing to try to teach the young'uns, even though they all (incorrectly) think they are awesome at it. Plagiarism is HUGE deal in academia, from the teaching and research perspectives. Just as important as citing your sources and not copying what they say word-for-word though is choosing reliable and accurate sources. Google has academic resources (though not as complete as other indexes I have found) and there are other public, private, for profit, not for profit, opinions, blogs, and whatever else out there you could happen upon. You really need to learn how to evaluate a source and determine if it is accurate for your purpose, otherwise it is easy to perpetuate a non-truth.

For my graduate work, one of the publications I regularly cited had a concentration we used to base our initial experiments on. The authors stated this concentration and cited their source. About a year and a half (6 months of which I was rotating in another lab on a different project, so really after about a year of working on my dissertation research), I was finally able to track down their source*. And they had cited it wrong. By a factor of 1000. I think I know how this happened because they had changed the units the original source used and probably got it mixed up. It ended up making life difficult. (Who cares because I am finished with that research project now, right?)

As a result of how difficult it is to navigate a citation train*, I was really conscientious about including details and original sources of that information in my final publication, for example the actual name for a particular body part or protein size, and the reviewers said it was too "jargony". How can the actual name of something be jargony? But I digress.

I think determining the validity and truth of your sources is important for everyone though, not just "academics". This hits me the most when I listen to politicians and read the news. I do not know if politics have become more political, if issues the government is now tackling are more controversial, if Americans have forgotten how to compromise to improve the overall state of our nation (and similarly in other countries), or if as I have gotten a bit older and with the training I have had as a scientist, I just am more aware of the contradictions, irrationality, and lack of source citing in statements that are made.

I had a couple of examples in real life that I was going to post, but I will just say, if you forward an email you received or believe everything you see on TV, do yourself a favor and pause next time to at least check it out on google and decide for yourself if the source is reliable or if there is something else to consider. If you do not have facts that might back up something you believe strongly in, that is fine, but do not make stuff up!

* By “citation train” I mean when you look something up and they cite the point, then you look that up and they have cited it too. Then you look that up and they have cited it too…until maybe, eventually, you will find the original source that “proved” something. A patent lawyer friend of mine once asked that I not do that - it is time consuming to sort this stuff out!