{"id":72238,"date":"2024-03-27T00:00:47","date_gmt":"2024-03-27T04:00:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/world.edu\/?p=72238"},"modified":"2024-03-27T00:00:47","modified_gmt":"2024-03-27T04:00:47","slug":"on-mal-attribution","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/world.edu\/on-mal-attribution\/","title":{"rendered":"On MAL-attribution"},"content":{"rendered":"

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I was recently reviewing a paper and saw my own work cited. Very nice, you might think. However, I was cited for saying a thing that I didn\u2019t say \u2013 a thing that I would never ever say. It was a thing that I have railed against in almost everything I\u2019ve written on the topic.<\/p>\n

Now I know that meanings are not fixed. People interpret. And that\u2019s generally good and we writers like to make people think their own thoughts. But we also like our readers to get what we are saying and not be 100% inaccurate.<\/p>\n

100% wrong, attributing the opposite of what is actually said is, in my books, mal- attribution not mis \u2013 attribution. It\u2019s a bit more than mis. Even if it\u2019s unintended, a mal-attribution has ongoing negative effects, as the text is read by others and taken and used as fact.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s par for the course I know. But hey ho, on this occasion I\u00a0decided to have a little moan to my facebook friends. I knew they would be sympathetic and I was pretty sure most of them had had exactly the same experience. And sure enough they had. But two of them had something more to say.<\/p>\n

The first facebook friend had a little story. I won\u2019t reveal their identity, just know I\u2019m repeating their story with permission. My friend said,<\/p>\n

\u201c I was once challenged in a PhD viva when I told the candidate that I hadn\u2019t written anything on a certain topic which they had claimed I had. They told me that I didn\u2019t know what I was talking about. It\u2019s some years ago but I am still sort of reeling from it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Gobsmacking eh for someone to tell their examiner that they knew better about what they had done. In a viva!<\/p>\n

Of course there\u2019s two ways to read this story. The first is that the candidate was really stupid or arrogant. The second, kinder explanation is that the candidate was in defensive defence mode and just blurted out the first thing that came to mind to justify their literatures work. If that was the case, I imagine they spent most the next night replaying the scene over and over and thinking of all of the several thousand alternative things they might have said.<\/p>\n

The second facebook friend referred me to a 2010 paper I had forgotten about,\u00a0Varieties of Ignorance<\/em>\u00a0by Andrew Abbott (here, paywalled<\/a>). Abbott was interested in how to understand and explain ignorance in scholarly work. So he decided to examine how one of his own books had been used and cited. He looked at both Wikipedia and the scholarly literature.<\/p>\n

Well, no prizes for guessing that the Wikipedia entry writer had entirely missed the mark, according to Abbott. The writer had used the old and largely debunked approach that Abbott not only critiqued but also reframed. This is a much bigger example of the kind of citation, what I am calling mal-attribution, that had irritated me.<\/p>\n

But when he got to the scholarly literatures, Abbott found that things were only marginally better. He found 105 articles which had cited his book in the year 2008.\u00a0\u00a0Of these, he judged that<\/p>\n