As reported by Inside Higher Ed, Charles Armstrong recently had to return the 2014 John K. Fairbank Prize in Asian History, awarded by the American Historical Association, because it was discovered that his book, Tyranny of the Weak: North Korea and the World, 1950-1992, contained at least 50 citation errors. Some of the mistakes were fairly trivial, such as getting dates wrong by a matter of days, but others were substantial, including the citation of evidently non-existent, misleading, or meaningless sources.
The American Historical Association issued this announcement:
After careful review the AHA identified a set of citations that did not meet professional standards. In response to AHA queries, Dr. Armstrong reviewed his work and the underlying scholarship and identified a number of instances where the source citations were incorrect. Dr. Armstrong has corrected the citation errors and, out of respect for the AHA, has returned the Fairbank Prize.
Armstrong’s publisher, the Cornell University Press, has announced that it will correct the errors on the electronic version of the book and will issue a corrected edition in paperback.
There are many advantages to publishing university press books, but source and cite checking is not one of them. There is little doubt that law review editors would have caught most of the problems in Tyranny of the Weak, which evidently included mis-citations as well as notes that did “not relate to the material covered.”
It has also been alleged, however, that Armstrong, who is the Korea Foundation Professor of Korean Studies at Columbia University, failed to give proper credit to other scholars. According to Prof. Balazs Szalontai, of Korea University, in South Korea, the lack of credit – to his own work and others’ – amounted in some cases to plagiarism or copyright violation. Armstrong replied that the errors were all honest mistakes and that he had never intended to take credit for the work of Szalontai or anyone else.
As good as they are at catching missing or faulty citations, even the most diligent law review editors will not discover what Szalontai calls “conspicuous similarities” to uncited books.
If only google had digitized the world's books…
When I was a lowly staff editor on a law journal doing C&S, we had to track down every cited source and put a print out or photo copy on file.
Why has it not become the norm for authors to do provide this material? They presumably already have all these sources at their disposal, so making copies requires no real effort beyond a bit of tedious copying which would probably be handed off to a secretary or grad student.
Or perhaps I ought to reframe that question. Why haven't publishers and journals started to require that authors provide this material upon acceptance of publication? It would save their staff an immense amount of time and trouble, though I'm not sure what all the 2Ls on journals would do any more.
I hate to call into question the competence of law journal students, but anyone who has ever done responsible C&S has probably had the experience of desperately trying to track down a non-existent source, only to find that it was serially mis-cited by a string of previous journal articles. It's pretty obvious that each successive author–or each successive journal editor–simply copied the cite from an earlier article. I encountered this a handful of times while on law review, and I've seen it dozens more times as a librarian assisting student editors. So, I'm not too sanguine about the relative competence of law journal spaders vs. UPs.
Anon – nice to see another law librarian at TFL.