Re: [xmca] Citing and Slighting

[mike cole <lchcmike@gmail.com>]

You will be pleased to know that Eugene has an extensive critique of our
editorial in an upcoming issue of mca.
mike

On Thu, Jun 10, 2010 at 7:00 AM, Michael Glassman <MGlassman@ehe.osu.edu>wrote:

> Hi David,
>
> I haven't read the editorial but I have to agree with you that "name
> dropping" is one of the more bizarre editorial critiques I have come across.
>  It reminds of of one of my favorite movie scenes from Amadeus in which
> after one of his first operas Mozart asks the Franz Joseph how he liked the
> music.  Fran Joseph says that well it was all right but there were problems.
>  Mozart asks what poblems.  And Franz Joseph says that well, there were too
> many notes.  To which Mozart states that there were just as many notes as
> needed, no more and no less.
>
> Generally this is true of citations I think.  Of course you should refrain
> from citing yourself unless necessary, or friends - but otherwise - WTH?
>  I've been doing some research on hyperlinks lately - and their history is
> that they are meant to function a great deal like citations - but in many
> ways citations don't only represent origination of information source but
> also associations - that these works offer associations and trails of ideas
> - when we write we are not only attempting to talk about a new idea but also
> pull together a web of information and integrate what we are writing into
> that web. This is both the author's responsibility but also the author's
> perogative.
>
> The couple of times I have gotten the name dropping critique (never
> explained or expanded upon) it has always struck me as the reviewer waving
> his hand in the air and saying "too many citations."
>
> Michael
>
> ________________________________
>
> From: xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu on behalf of David Kellogg
> Sent: Thu 6/10/2010 3:56 AM
> To: xmca
> Subject: [xmca] Citing and Slighting
>
>
>
> I just read Mike (Cole's) and Wolff-Michael (Roth's) editorial "The
> referencing practices of Mind, Culture, and Activity: On citing (sighting?)
> and being (sighted?)" with what I must confess is a mild dose of that most
> unworthy emotion, irritation. I will try to compensate for it with generous
> glop of humor, but I imagine some of this must be at the expense of the
> authors.
>
> For those of you with no access to the article, I summarize. Michael and
> Michael hector prospective writers, in the name of the readers, about
> unnecessary citations which they consider "name dropping" and resume
> stuffing moves. We are given an amusing assortment of examples of this, not
> only as examples of bad practices, but in the editorial itself, for example
> when an overenthusiastic citation of Ilyenkov makes it appear that he is
> entirely responsible for the dialectical materialist account of modern
> science and poor Bakhtin is dragged in by the ears to make a completely
> uncontested point about monologism and dialogism (even more amusingly, the
> title of Bakhtin's book "Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics" is given
> incorrectly).
>
> What the editorial really LACKS is any explanation for this lamentable
> phenomenon beyond blaming the victims. As an author myself, I can assure the
> editors that it is not, in general, my own name that I drop or my own resume
> that I stuff. Why, then, do I do it?
>
> Well, anybody who reads Wolff-Michael's editorials on a regular basis may
> notice that we are often enjoined to cite MCA for no other reason than to
> increase the journal's impact factor. And anybody who has access to my
> voluminous collection of MCA rejection slips will notice that one of the
> most common reasons for rejection is that the citations are incomplete.
>
> As the authors say, this problem is by no means confined to MCA; I can name
> half a dozen journals where my articles were ONLY published after the
> insertion of references that I have very good reason to suspect were to the
> work of the reviewers. I must say, though, that MCA is better than their
> word on this: in general, my rejections do NOT say "revise and resubmit with
> more references"--they tend to say "Don't bother, kid. You're not in our
> league!"
>
> I paraphrase, of course. But I could certainly quote and cite.
>
> David Kellogg
> Seoul National University of Education
>
>
>
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