Kristine
Posts: 3061 Joined: Sep. 2006
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For what it's worth:
Harley, K. (June, 2011). Book reviews. The Indexer 29(2), p. 93-94. I review Melanie J. Norton's book, Introductory Concepts in Information Science, Second Edition. Quote | In fact, this reviewer recommends that any novice, whether indexer or information science student, read the last four chapters only with caution. Norton, in Chapter 9 on bibliometrics, uses percentages to describe Lotka’s frequency distribution, which is misleading. Care must be exercised in drawing conclusions from Lotka’s pattern as it is neither a mathematical formula nor statistically rigorous; Norton neglects to say this. She apparently does not understand that Bradford’s Law describes a pattern after intentionally dividing journals into three categories of diminishing citation frequencies (core and scatter), which is likewise not statistically accurate. She does not explain which allegedly ‘qualitative’ research methods are used in bibliometrics, and the reviewer is not aware of any. Chapter 10, on economics, does not even mention the concept of return on investment or the so-called ‘crisis’ in scholarly publication.
In Chapter 11, Norton seems to erroneously credit NASA with an inadvertent development of Velcro in the 1960s, when it was intentionally patented in the 1950s. The text subheaded ‘Value in context’ could have been shortened and integrated with the rest of the chapter; setting out this section achieves a Zeno’s paradox of abstract tortuousness. |
I know it's boring, but it's exciting to me, because I'm new at scholarly writing.
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"I happen to think that this prerequisite criterion of empirical evidence is itself not empirical." - Clive
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