Blog cited in a peer-reviewed journal

Feb 13, 2008 Alun Science, The Past 5 Comments Archaeoastronomy, Archaeology, Giulio Magli, Oxford Journal of Archaeology, Publishing

Bill Cara­her men­tioned recently that Law and Lit­er­at­ure are fields which are accept­ing cita­tions of blog posts in art­icles. We can add another to the list, Archaeology.

Giulio Magli has a paper on the Ori­ent­a­tion of Roman towns in the Oxford Journal of Archae­ology this month. I’m not going to com­ment much on his con­clu­sions because it would mean writ­ing up extens­ive amounts of work in pro­gress for a blog. What I will draw atten­tion to is the bibliography.

Yes it’s me.

I’ve been work­ing on a stat­ist­ical model for ana­lys­ing Greek temple align­ments. If it’s sound then it would work not only for sets of astro­nom­ical align­ments, but also pos­sibly ques­tions about coin dis­tri­bu­tions or plant pop­u­la­tions or things fur­ther afield than archae­ology. That’s if. It’s work-in-progress.

I’m not a stat­ist­i­cian, nor are many of my inten­ded audi­ence. So I’ve devised a new model which I hope is historian-friendly and applied the model to a dis­tri­bu­tion of ori­ent­a­tions of Roman camps (writ­ten up in OJA) and tried to see if there’s any­thing to be said. The ori­ginal paper by Richard­son had a flaw in its applic­a­tion of Chi-squared, as noted by Peterson. Peterson is a far bet­ter stat­ist­i­cian than I and than at least 99% of archae­olo­gists and ancient his­tor­i­ans. Unfor­tu­nately because the aver­age archae­olo­gist or his­tor­ian is quite bad with stats, com­plex stat­ist­ics are a bit of a waste of time. The people who need to use them don’t under­stand them, and have no interest in learn­ing how to under­stand them. The aim of my model is accur­acy, but it’s also intel­li­gib­il­ity, which means I’m sac­ri­fi­cing power for under­stand­ing. The ques­tion which con­cerns me is am I sac­ri­fi­cing too much power, so that my method becomes meaningless?

The num­ber of stat­ist­i­cians with a famili­ar­ity with astro­nomy and the ancient world is rather small, so I put up an entry for com­ment. This is the blog entry Guglio Magli cites. The res­ult is an early draft of a bit of my thesis is now being cited in the peer-reviewed lit­er­at­ure. I’m pleased, if a little con­cerned because my thoughts have moved on a bit. Brad Schae­fer (2006a, 2000b) and Anthony Aveni (2006a, 2006b) have vigour­ously dis­cussed the import­ance of stats as proof in astro­nom­ical align­ments. Schae­fer (2006a:26–7) is scath­ing of 2σ sig­ni­fic­ance, which I used in my model. From a social sci­ence point of view I thought that 2σ meant 95% cer­tainty, but he argues that 50% of 3σ claims turn out to be false. I know people say there’s no such thing as a prob­lem, only an oppor­tun­ity, but at first read­ing this would seem to be a ter­minal oppor­tun­ity for my model.

It prob­ably isn’t. Schae­fer is talk­ing about stat­ist­ics in the absence of his­tor­ical evid­ence. He also states ‘a word of eth­no­graphy is worth a thou­sand align­ments.’ (Schae­fer 2006a:29) In my research I’m using that kind of evid­ence as well, which helps improve mat­ters. I’m also adjust­ing the model so that the reader can eas­ily decide what they think is suf­fi­ciently sig­ni­fic­ant, rather than present­ing a fig­ure on a take it or leave it basis.

If I’m not so happy about the model pub­lished on IScience, where does this leave Magli’s paper? Exactly as it stood before.

Chan­ging my mind on what I’ve writ­ten does not inval­id­ate his cita­tion, He was happy with the model to apply it to his work. Cit­ing back to the web­log means that people can decide for them­selves if I got it right first time. Besides every­one changes their mind as they think more on a topic, unless they’re dead or dog­matic. The 2007 entry accur­ately reflec­ted my thoughts at the time, which is all you can say of any art­icle. It’s the nature of aca­demic dis­course that it’s a con­ver­sa­tion with a built-in time lag. There do how­ever remain some cita­tion issues, which are not Magli’s fault, which mean that the PD(Q) car­ni­val / journal is clearly needed.

I have to leave the blog entry as is. That’s some­thing I’m happy to do. If alter­a­tions are made then I should make them very clear. Magli and the OJA are pla­cing their trust in me that I won’t go back and stealth cor­rect places where I now think I’ve made errors. I also need to leave it where it is.

That’s some­thing I plan to do, but it is more dif­fi­cult. What hap­pens if Word­Press goes bust? What hap­pens if the site is hacked and wiped? What hap­pens to the blog if Leicester decides in the future to rein­teg­rate ISciences back into Phys­ics and remove the ISciences site? PD(Q) will offer a per­man­ent cita­tion method which will appeal to tech­no­phobes and hope­fully a cur­ated archive, so that in the future people will be secure in the know­ledge their cit­ing the same article.

My ini­tial thought that this was the first web­log I’d seen cited in a tra­di­tional journal, but that would require a some­what pedantic defin­i­tion of web­log. Web­moor and Witmore’s page on Sym­met­rical Archae­ology was cited in the Dec 2007 issue of World Archae­ology by Wit­more.* Even earlier, Mike Hey­worth cites the RSS feed of the CBA blog he admin­is­ters in in his Inter­net Archae­ology art­icle from 2004, which scores even more web 2.0 points in my book. Non­ethe­less it would sug­gest that PD(Q) will ful­fil a need.

As for the mild shock of see­ing a bit of my draft thesis cited in a journal, I’m flattered. I think Magli has gen­er­ously done me a big favour. When I do pub­lish a more developed model it will be clear that I’m not pla­gi­ar­ising him. It’s also a bit of encour­age­ment that I’m at least head­ing in vaguely the right dir­ec­tion if people are cit­ing my work. I’m now won­der­ing if my blog entry is good enough to be cited in the peer-reviewed lit­er­at­ure, does that mean it’s sig­ni­fic­ant enough to count as a research output?

If you’d like aca­dem­ics to be pay­ing atten­tion to your work, then why not sub­mit a blog entry to whatever we even­tu­ally call PD(Q)?

Bib­li­o­graphy

Aveni, A.F. 2006a. ‘Cri­tique of Key­note Address: Evid­ence and Inten­tion­al­ity: On Method in Archae­oastro­nomy.’ View­ing the Sky Through Past and Present Cul­tures: Selec­ted Papers from the Oxford VII Con­fer­ence on Archae­oastro­nomy. eds. Todd W. Bostwick and Bryan Bates. Pueblo Grade Museum Anthro­po­lo­gical Papers No. 15. City of Phoenix Parks and Recre­ation Depart­ment. 57–70.

Aveni, A.F. 2006b. ‘Reply to Rebut­tal: Schaefer’s Rigid Eth­no­cen­tric Cri­teria.’ View­ing the Sky Through Past and Present Cul­tures: Selec­ted Papers from the Oxford VII Con­fer­ence on Archae­oastro­nomy. eds. Todd W. Bostwick and Bryan Bates. Pueblo Grade Museum Anthro­po­lo­gical Papers No. 15. City of Phoenix Parks and Recre­ation Depart­ment. 79–83.

Schae­fer, B.E. 2006a. ‘Key­note Address: Case Stud­ies of Three of the Most Fam­ous Claimed Archae­oastro­nom­ical Align­ments in North Amer­ica.’ View­ing the Sky Through Past and Present Cul­tures: Selec­ted Papers from the Oxford VII Con­fer­ence on Archae­oastro­nomy. eds. Todd W. Bostwick and Bryan Bates. Pueblo Grade Museum Anthro­po­lo­gical Papers No. 15. City of Phoenix Parks and Recre­ation Depart­ment. 27–56.

Schae­fer, B.E. 2006b. ‘Rebut­tal to Cri­tique: No Astro­nom­ical Align­ments at the Cara­col.’ View­ing the Sky Through Past and Present Cul­tures: Selec­ted Papers from the Oxford VII Con­fer­ence on Archae­oastro­nomy. eds. Todd W. Bostwick and Bryan Bates. Pueblo Grade Museum Anthro­po­lo­gical Papers No. 15. City of Phoenix Parks and Recre­ation Depart­ment. 71–77.

*I can’t link dir­ectly to the art­icle as it isn’t on the Ingenta Con­nect site yet. The link to the Sym­met­rical Archae­ology site may not work either. At the time of link­ing the Traum­werk Sym­met­rical Archae­ology site was not serving pages and the updated human­it­ies lab ver­sion could not find page 9, and had noth­ing to say about archae­ology. I don’t mean this nas­tily, because this is almost cer­tainly bey­ond the authors’ con­trol, but if cita­tions to a web­site hos­ted by major uni­ver­sity can break so quickly, then what can we ask of people from out­side aca­demia who have some­thing inter­est­ing to say and even less sup­port. Tech­nic­ally, it’s a forum rather than a web­log, but it’s open to com­ments from read­ers and breaks down when you want to look at it. For 90% of aca­dem­ics that’s the defin­i­tion of a web­log.