Most of my remarks about form still stand, and I’m stil very uncomfortable with your updated citation (Evans 1971).
Citation form functions here as a rhetorical device. I mean this as in “dark arts” rhetorical: its intent is to make a non-academic publication look more like an academic publication. The subtext is “look how well researched my claims are”, or perhaps more generously “this is settled science”.
What happens if we rewrite your claim, erasing the academic form, and reinstating the context?
What you write expands to the following: “Curiosity leads us to ask questions, as shown by Evans’ 1971 research on ‘The Ontario Test of Intrinsic Motivation, Question Asking, and Autistic Thinking’.” The implication is that the researcher has established a causal link between increased curiosity and increased question-asking behaviour.
If we look at the abstract of the paper itself, we get a slightly different story. The author is reporting on a study of the OTIM (Ontario Test of Intrinsic Motivation) designed to distinguish between various sub-traits of the trait “curiosity”, and the study gets null results on two of the scales examined (consultation and observation), turning up only one significant correlation, that between “directed thinking” and question-asking behaviour. Moreover this isn’t an experimental protocol, but a passive study, so causal inference is not warranted here: “correlation doesn’t imply causation”.
So really it would be much more accurate to write: “The ‘directed thinking’ aspect of curiosity seems correlated with asking lots of questions, one study observed (Evans 1971).”
This isn’t really settled science: it’s one study, reporting on one sub-trait of curiosity. If you want to make the broad generalization that “curiosity is that which leads us to ask questions”, then I expect you to cite a different kind of work, such as a broad survey listing many replications of the initial study.
In the cases where you cite a singular study, it’s a good idea to have read the full text, not just the abstract, to see whether there are any major issues with the study: otherwise you may be jumping to conclusions and updating too strongly in the researchers’ direction. This is especially true of old singular studies: if you’re not aware of more recent replications of the research, is that because attempts are replication were failure, or because the study asked a question which has since then been dissolved or reframed, or simply because you don’t know of more recent research? Those questions are worth asking.
The question isn’t what I or someone else “thinks is fine”. The question is whether I can trust you and your scholarship on factual matters investigated by academic research.
If, on examining the very first citation in your text, I come across sloppy or careless handling of factual matters, I am going to revise my evaluation of your trustworthiness—downward and significantly. You shouldn’t see this as a bad thing: after all, it’s what you would expect of an editorial board of an academic publication with decent standards.
In some instances, I use citations for pointing to relevant studies, without intending to imply that this is settled science. But I now realize that it does carry that implication, and that the wording of the sentence is particularly unfortunate. I have updated the first and other footnotes to take this into account.
By “thinks is fine”, I didn’t mean some arbitrary personal standard, but precisely the kind of epistemic abilities that you mention.
I understand your revision and thank you for pointing in out, so I can keep trying harder.
Most of my remarks about form still stand, and I’m stil very uncomfortable with your updated citation (Evans 1971).
Citation form functions here as a rhetorical device. I mean this as in “dark arts” rhetorical: its intent is to make a non-academic publication look more like an academic publication. The subtext is “look how well researched my claims are”, or perhaps more generously “this is settled science”.
What happens if we rewrite your claim, erasing the academic form, and reinstating the context?
What you write expands to the following: “Curiosity leads us to ask questions, as shown by Evans’ 1971 research on ‘The Ontario Test of Intrinsic Motivation, Question Asking, and Autistic Thinking’.” The implication is that the researcher has established a causal link between increased curiosity and increased question-asking behaviour.
If we look at the abstract of the paper itself, we get a slightly different story. The author is reporting on a study of the OTIM (Ontario Test of Intrinsic Motivation) designed to distinguish between various sub-traits of the trait “curiosity”, and the study gets null results on two of the scales examined (consultation and observation), turning up only one significant correlation, that between “directed thinking” and question-asking behaviour. Moreover this isn’t an experimental protocol, but a passive study, so causal inference is not warranted here: “correlation doesn’t imply causation”.
So really it would be much more accurate to write: “The ‘directed thinking’ aspect of curiosity seems correlated with asking lots of questions, one study observed (Evans 1971).”
This isn’t really settled science: it’s one study, reporting on one sub-trait of curiosity. If you want to make the broad generalization that “curiosity is that which leads us to ask questions”, then I expect you to cite a different kind of work, such as a broad survey listing many replications of the initial study.
In the cases where you cite a singular study, it’s a good idea to have read the full text, not just the abstract, to see whether there are any major issues with the study: otherwise you may be jumping to conclusions and updating too strongly in the researchers’ direction. This is especially true of old singular studies: if you’re not aware of more recent replications of the research, is that because attempts are replication were failure, or because the study asked a question which has since then been dissolved or reframed, or simply because you don’t know of more recent research? Those questions are worth asking.
The question isn’t what I or someone else “thinks is fine”. The question is whether I can trust you and your scholarship on factual matters investigated by academic research.
If, on examining the very first citation in your text, I come across sloppy or careless handling of factual matters, I am going to revise my evaluation of your trustworthiness—downward and significantly. You shouldn’t see this as a bad thing: after all, it’s what you would expect of an editorial board of an academic publication with decent standards.
In some instances, I use citations for pointing to relevant studies, without intending to imply that this is settled science. But I now realize that it does carry that implication, and that the wording of the sentence is particularly unfortunate. I have updated the first and other footnotes to take this into account.
By “thinks is fine”, I didn’t mean some arbitrary personal standard, but precisely the kind of epistemic abilities that you mention.
I understand your revision and thank you for pointing in out, so I can keep trying harder.