Scholarship AND Application

I feel there is often a tension between scholarship and application. Sometimes we in the dirty boots brigade - Polytechnics - can focus too much on the applied nature of what we teach, or the 'doing', without explaining the underpinning theory. Alternatively, the University sector can sometimes focus too much on the scholarship or theory side, and produce graduates who know all the alternatives, but none of the practice.

There's a great Aussie movie called "The Castle" (1997) where the main character, Darryl Kerrigan, says "But it's what you DO with it, darl!" which guides my teaching.

Because learning is not just about the doing: its the knowing as well. We teach theory so that we give people choices. When something hasn't worked, we can take apart the theory,  examine the failure point, and reassemble it in a different configuration to use next time and cover off our previous roadblock.

That's doing AND thinking.

My view is that anything we learn should help us to learn better next time. So as teachers (aka lecturers, tutors - what you will), our job is to help our students to become reflective learners.

We help others to build themselves.

I set out to mentor my learners so they hone their own learning processes, to get better and better - more adaptive - at their own learning, regardless of their particular learning goals.

Then they can both think and do. A winning combination!


Sam

• Reference: Sitch, Rob (1997). The Castle. Australia: Working Dog, Village Roadshow Entertainment 

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The Boys in the Basement

Stephen King, master of suspense, gave me a great gift when he wrote Bag of Bones (1998).

Bag of Bones is a book about a writer - Mike Noonan - who has a terrible case of writer's block. Mike talks about "the boys in the basement" as "an old trick from my writing days. Work your body, rest your mind, let the boys in the basement do their jobs" (King, 1998, p. 120).

As I see them, those 'boys in the basement' keep thinking and researching and making connections... while we are upstairs doing something else, oblivious in our lives. They turn the basement into an incident room. Our life fragments are in evidence bags: tagged and piled and waiting for connections to fit them into the big picture. Nothing is lost, but it is not necessarily sorted or linked, either.

(In Bag of Bones, the 'boys in the basement' have to break into the cellar to be able to even start their analysis; King, 1998, p. 60).

They keep hard at work and fire up when something doesn't ring true, and shouting up the stairs to us, trying to tell us something is fishy... no: rotten... until we eventually start to listen (King, 1998).

My thinking has sparked a lot of blog posts, often while I am 'supposed' to be doing something else. To me, blogging is free-wheeling time which allows my 'boys in the basement' time to regroup, accurately analyse flaws in my work, and holler up the stairs until I hear them.

Invaluable. Thank you, Mr King.


Sam

• Reference: King, Stephen (1998). Bag of Bones. USA: Scribner.
  
  I thought I had posted on this topic before, but despite a fairly thorough search, I can find nothing. So hence this late piece to thank Mr King, seventeen years after the inspiration was initially delivered.

read more "The Boys in the Basement"

Searching for a Pan-Database Database

I tend to start searching for research materials using GoogleScholar: because it is easy.

Using some Boolean search tools: +, "-", and -, used without spaces helps to narrow search. Plus to say "I want all these things" (Google+Scholar), double quote marks to say "I want it to say EXACTLY this" ("Google Scholar"), and minus to say "I don't want this item" (-GoogleScholar).

When that is used in conjunction with the Harzing journal ranker, you can focus on materials from the top journals in your field.

My institute's library has a few databases - largely ProQuest - but it is a very fragmented search environment. Perhaps "Stumble Upon" might truly be a better term.

Who would think that in the age of Google and the interweb that the searchability of periodicals and journals would be confined to individual, paid access databases, depending on who owns the publishing house? You cannot, unless a paid-up member, even see the database indexes for some publishers.

And that is where Google comes in. Google can see the indexes, and a Boolean search using GoogleScholar, then Google, will usually turn up the article you want. You may not yet have access to it, but at least you will now know what it is that you want to get access to.

In my view, academic journal search has not caught up with technology. Search should not be as arcane as dipping into closed database after closed database. This mimics the old index file drawers in paper libraries.

I am lucky enough to have access to the Ministry of Education library here in New Zealand, and they have a tool called "OneSearch" which searches all materials that they have access to. It saves so much time, and then the accuracy of search itself is up to me understanding the terminology of the field, not in knowing how to find the databases themselves.

We badly need a global pan-database database. Maybe that might form a future Google project.


Sam

References:

• Harzing, Anne-Wil (2015). Journal Quality List. Retrieved 12 October 2015 from http://www.harzing.com/download/jql_journal.pdf  
• Ministry of Education (n.d.). Ministry of Education Library. Retrieved 12 October 2015 from https://library.education.govt.nz/

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Out of the Slough of Despond

As previously mentioned, I fell into a Slough of Despond (Alcott, 1869, p. 11) when undertaking my Master's thesis. Twice.

However, I think I will be luckier in my PhD process, because of three key things:

• Self-knowledge: I know more about what is likely to knock me off-track. 
• Strategies & Actions: Because I know more, I can put things in place to prevent those things being a problem. 

There are three of us doing our PhDs in our Business School, all starting in 2016. While our disciplines are quite different (sports leadership, future-proofing the accounting profession, SPSS analysis of financial instrument viability), we are looking to support each other through the process. Also, being at Kiwi Unis, we will all face a viva. Being able to help each other prepare for that will be fantastic. Go 'Kapa PhD'.

Currently, I have two supervisors, and hope to add a third from another Uni as a technical advisor. I hope that by having three supervisors from the outset I will be able to create some continuity of supervision for the five years I think this project will take. This is as a marked difference to my Master's thesis where I found it very, very hard to keep going when my supervisor changed in my last semester.

I have also created a Facebook page which I am banking material to, with the aim of sharing with Kapa PhD later on. Right now I am using the page with other NZers who are doing Inger Mewburn's edX MOOC: How to Survive Your PhD.

In doing my PhD, I wanted to ensure that I built a community of support to help me through the process. Facebook, a number of supervisors who are in from the start, and the Team PhD are my solutions to hopefully prevent a derail.

Oh, and I am DEFINITELY going to get seek funding to be able to PAY someone to transcribe my data!!


Sam

References:  

• Alcott, Louisa May (1869). Little Women: or Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy (Fourth Edition, 1915). USA: Orchard House
• Australian National University & Mewburn, Inger (2015). How to Survive Your PhD. Retrieved 26 September 2015 from https://www.edx.org/course/how-survive-phd-anux-rsit-01x
• Facebook (2015). Kiwi PhDers Community. Retrieved 26 September 2015 from https://www.facebook.com/kiwiphders?ref=hl

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IMNZ: New Zealand's 'professional' management organisation

I have always considered NZIM (NZ Institute of Management), or now, IMNZ, as the professional organisation for managers in New Zealand. I have been an NZIM associate member since 1995, since completing my Higher Diploma in Management.

However, I have tried a couple of times over the years to become a full professional member, but they don't really seem set up to welcome 'people like me' as members of the organisation.

By 'people like me', I mean someone who mostly teaches management, rather than someone who mostly applies it. While I am on governance boards, I am not in a management position. I teach management to year two and three students on a management degree (B.Com) and on a B.Sport & Rec.

On IMNZ's full member application forms, I don’t fit the boxes.There is no space for management qualifications or governance experience in their forms - nor, possibly, in their thinking. I find it disappointing – no, incomprehensible – that those who teach management are apparently shut out of membership of the New Zealand professional management organisation.

Just to clarify, a certificate in management is an introductory level 4 qualification consisting of eight papers, of ten credits each. 80 credits. To compare, a degree is usually 360 credits, a master's a further 180 credits and a PhD 240-ish plus.

It appears to me that IMNZ wants members who are practitioners, and they can skip that nasty formal learning part.

To check whether my perceptions were wrong, I contacted IMNZ to ask (despite the forms indicating that those perceptions were likely correct). While I had a nice reply saying that, yes, lecturers weren't really catered for and that my feedback would be passed to the board, I have had no further reply in six months. The net effect in my view is that IMNZ don't want members who learn about, teach and research management.

Additionally, I had to ask to have someone advise me of what the application process was, as IMNZ's forms did not detail what happens once my data drops into IMNZ’s black box. That is not good management – and that too is disappointing.

Perhaps they need some management scholars after all.

But those management scholars won't include me. After twenty years, I will not be renewing my membership. I don't see the point in continuing to try to belong to an organisation that obviously has no interest in me. Bewildering as that is in today's climate of falling participation.

And just a little point of interest: Management Magazine, the mainstay of management publications in New Zealand, has incomprehensibly merged with NZ Business Magazine: to the detriment of publication quality and credibility. I just read today what is probably the "why" behind the merger: the owner of 3Media who operated Management Magazine is just about to be banged up for fraud.

Some more management scholars could really have been useful there too.

Sam

References:

• IMNZ (2015). Professional Qualifications Guidelines 1 May 2015. NZ: Author
• Kidd, Rob (2015). Magazine publisher admits fraud charges, faces jail. Retrieved 6 October 2015 from http://www.nzherald.co.nz/business/news/article.cfm?c_id=3&objectid=11524620 

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Knowledge, expectations and fear

When I had just started doing my Master's, my supervisor asked me to present my research at a highly specialist and elite conference (to be delivered nine months in to a two year programme of study).

To start off with, I was SO excited. I had been asked to present at a conference!

Then, as the realisation dawned, the request completely derailed me. I had fear, imposter syndrome (Clance & Imes, 1978), and feelings of isolating inadequacy all at once. I felt that I couldn't talk to my supervisor about it (as he had asked me to submit an abstract, so must think that I was 'good enough'), nor was there anyone else that I knew who was going through the same experience (I was the last - and only - Master's by thesis student in the programme, and I was studying at distance).

Perfect storm.

I ended up writing a submission in answer to the call for abstracts for conference, but the fear was almost crippling. My fear delayed my submission - I put off writing it, and then submitting it - until I was so late that the response wasn't reviewed, but was simply accepted.

I was so green that I didn't even realise that abstract were reviewed. That we didn't just auto-magically get in. This was my first time presenting at a conference, and, of course, it had to be at a conference that really meant something to me.

My supervisor was very encouraging, all the way through. However, if I had been given a more structured understanding of the process of abstracts, reviews and so forth, it would have been so VERY useful. I had no idea of any of that.

Academia is so arcane, we often don't even know to ask, because we don't know what we don't know.

Because of my experiences, because it is so easy to assume foreknowledge, I try to be more explicit with my research students. I have deliberate conversations, and encourage them to be open with me and to be questioning. And I probably only get it right half of the time, even then.

And I try to keep front-and-centre how daunting these requests can be.


Sam

• Reference: Clance, P. R. & Imes, S. (1978). The Imposter Phenomenon in High Achieving Women: Dynamics and Therapeutic Intervention. Psychotherapy Theory, Research and Practice, 15(3), 241-249. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0086006

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Searching for a quote

I have been hunting for the source of a quote for some time.

It was from a leadership or management expert who left the profession for ten years (I think I remember the phrase "went out for a decade" but it could just be my mental paraphrasing) and when they returned to the field, they found nothing had changed.

This lack of change is implied to be 'no surprise'. What was meant by their absence and subsequent return - I think - was that no new theories had arisen in the field in that missing decade: that management was all a bit same-old, same-old.

While I have the shadowy feeling that this could be an American chap, I have hunted and hunted for the source, to no avail. I have searched Drucker's quotes, and Warren Bennis's. Nothing. Zip. Nada.

Searching is very hard when you don't know where to start looking. 

It was such a great premise (though a sweeping statement) that management doesn't change, which I think applies to humanity as a whole. Damn, I should have made a note!


Any help that anyone can provide would be greatly appreciated. I want to use this in my teaching, and, if I can't find the source, I can't use it :-(

Sam

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Showing climate change leadership

A fellow academic asked me a difficult question just recently. He said:

• Climate volatility and mass extinction events bring fear that can only be addressed by fundamental change.
  
  Politicians have been 'negotiating' for over 20 years and the best they can do is 'non-binding agreements' (i.e. a fig leaf that looks like we are doing something when we aren't doing anything). They managed to show leadership by printing enough money to save the global banking system from collapse in 2008 and subsequently, but the much bigger issue of climate change hasn't connected or brought forth the same crisis response.
  
  [W]e need individual business leaders to show real leadership and react to the crisis. But what has stopped them from doing so thus far?

Wow: that's a big question.

I think that our difficulty comes in large part because we have set up governments which are dominated by an electoral cycle, with short-term-ism embedded in its fundamental nature. No one is rewarded for long-term thinking. To quote Sir Terry Pratchett, we get an "+++Out of Cheese Error +++ MELON MELON MELON +++ Redo From Start +++" error (1996, p. 185).

My pessimistic view is that the human race will need to actually be in the run up to the cliff in order to take action. Hmm. No, that's my optimistic view as well.

In leadership I teach that to create cultural change we need a situation to use as a lever. The common ones are a weak culture; a change of leader; a dramatic crisis; or a young or small organisation (Robbins, 1991).

To consider this, we have strong national cultures, and we are none of us very young organisations (cf nations). We get changes of leadership all the time, but there are no rewards for trying to change humanity's current processes. However, if we can show clearly that there is a dramatic crisis by showing unobfuscated data, there is a chance of change sticking.

But we might have to adopt a big tobacco media approach: "No, you are not actually on fire. You simply have a temperature due to sitting too close to the window in summer". Perhaps we have to tell people that CC DOESN'T exist. In shifty government-ese. That might work. And televise people who successfully sue you for saying that. And show toddlers who have died from CC on the news.

We could present an enemy whom we can defeat.

We also have to show the WIIFM (what's in it for me) to people whom we want to shift. As to how you provide very clear, cogent, and fact based information, presented without emotional manipulation, is the REALLY hard part. You need crystal clear facts.

Hans & Ola Rosling are doing some good work in this area. Their clips at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PksHSNRZ-cs and https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCMbmqUMqzerMSM48pGYMYsg are great, but they are not getting enough airtime.

 We then have have to educate, support, and create participation in the required change.

However, we are very unlikely to make change that will make life harder for us personally. The public perception is that the climate change brigade are implying a return to serf technology.

Our self-interest undermines any change we might make. We will green-wash or simply badge our own choices ("Oh yes, I am contributing to a better planet. I bought my Starbucks coffee in a recyclable cup").

Depressing, isn't it.


Sam

References:

• Pratchett, Terry (1996). Hogfather. UK: Victor Gollancz. 
• Robbins, Stephen P. (1991). Management (3rd Edition). USA: Prentice Hall

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The Death Knell for LinkedIn Groups?

Ryan McDougall from LinkedIn created a thread recently entitled "Changes Coming to LinkedIn Groups", outlining new changes in the works. None of the proposed changes will, in my opinion, address the issues that have arisen recently about automatically flagging posts (and moving the poster to the naughty corner), non-notification of threads and lack of ability to contact the entire group directly.

If your posts are moved by the LI algorithms to the naughty corner, you stay in the naughty corner for a week, before being able to continue posting or commenting. The algorithms are buggy, and quite effectively disengage group members. When you suddenly can't post to your groups, you feel alienated - slapped in the face - and don't necessarily realise that it is LI, not your group moderators or fellow posters who have shut you out.

Fellow poster, Jonathan Case, commented that, in his view, as LinkedIn is "free, you truly can't complain too much about it".

However, I feel that we unpaid members can and should complain when we aren't happy.

That is because LinkedIn (LI) can - and does - monetise the platform through recruitment and recruiters. Recruiters are paid, professional members with access to all of we unpaid members.

We, as the raw recruitment material, are the cattle. As such, we provide the potential for LI's monetisation. And LI should be concerned, because when cattle no longer get palatable food, they will roam onward to richer pastures. That decreases LI's ability to monetise.

I joined LinkedIn because it was great for my profile, but I stayed for the groups.

Prior to June I felt an incredibly strong sense of thriving community on LI. 'Thriving' is no longer a term I would use. Since the June changes I have spent less and less time on LI. The groups that once teemed with live now feel closed, one-way, and stifled.

'Dying' is a more apt term.

Unfortunately we can no longer check our group statistics to find out just how much they are dying by, as LI scrapped access to those statistics in June.

The Group daily digest mailers which once included all links are a part of the death of LI: people can no longer scan the activity in their groups, so they don't check in. That habit has been compounded in the thousands.

Fascinating how pervasive this is. Other people who were regular contributors have stopped posting. Discussions have dried up. The herd is starting to roam.

I am about to informally survey my LI contacts, and see how they feel. The survey link is here, if you would like to contribute your views. I will collate and publish the results on LI, or you can send me a message if you are interested.

...and I am actively looking for a new platform. "Oh give me a home, where the buffalo roam..."


Sam

References:  

• LinkedIn Help (2015). New Groups Features. Retrieved 10 October 2015 from https://help.linkedin.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/61173/ 
• McDougall, Ryan (2015). Changes Coming to LinkedIn Groups. Retrieved 10 October 2015 from https://www.linkedin.com/grp/post/8285624-6057149522113552386

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Migrating to Google Calendar

If you are like me, and technology is moving so fast that it has morphed into magic over the past few years, then you might find this post useful.

By that, I mean that either something works, or it doesn't. And when it doesn't work, the source of the issue appears to be something as esoteric and unrelated as how you hold your mouth. Or whether you had salad dressing. Or something.

When things work auto-magically it is WONDERFUL. When they don't it is hair-tearing-out-frustration-and-screaming-at-the-universe-GRRRR!

There doesn't appear to be much in between, actually. A binary pairing. Wax on, wax off.

I have just migrated to an android phone. With that change, I have been trying - vainly - since getting it a month ago, to get Google calendar to sync with my Outlook calendar so I can have one common calendar across two PCs, a laptop and my phone.

I had assumed that it was my bloated, desktop-bound Outlook calendar that was at fault. I read everything I could get my hands on about how to sync calendars. I found, to my horror, that I had to manually synchronise the two <argh!> so I spent weeks trying to export my calendar as a .csv file, so that I could then import it to Google. Every time I tried, the blasted chunk of junk called Outlook crashed.

"Waily, waily!" I cried - to no avail, of course. I read blogs and helpdesk posts and techy stuff until my eyes bled. And then I found a cute little piece of kit called CodeTwo Outlook Sync. "Yay!" I exclaimed. My problems were solved!

At last I could export my calendar. And I did. However, I could not import it into my Google calendar. It would NOT import. "Google has imported 0 entries". What?!

Once more, I was back on the magic roundabout trying to understand Tech-ese. I found a useful post explaining that the column formats were wrong in my export from Outlook, and the formats were the barrier to my calendar data importing. I braced myself for data manipulation AND manual exporting and importing. My energy for tackling this task was at a low ebb, and each return to it was even more sapping.

But, then...! I found a wee blog post by Roland Waddilove on the topic of syncing the Outlook and Google calendars, recommending - gasp - a piece of freeware called Calendar Sync.

And it is just the piece of magic I needed.

No exporting. No importing. No data manipulation. Just a perfect turnkey piece of kit.

My calendars are synchronised. Free. Thanks PPPIndia!


Sam

References:

• Waddilove, Roland (2015). How to Sync Google and Outlook Calendars: alternatives to the defunct Google sync utility. Retrieved 24 September 2015 from http://www.pcadvisor.co.uk/how-to/software/how-sync-google-outlook-calendars-3500196/
• Download Outlook Sync at http://www.codetwo.com/download/
• Download CalendarSync at http://www.pppindia.com/calendar-sync/index.html

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The Slough of Despond

When I did my Masters, I was the LAST - and only - master's by thesis student.

While I am pretty good at getting on with things, and my planning skills are well-honed (better be, being a management lecturer!), I fell into two "Slough[s] of Despond" (Alcott, 1869, p. 11) while studying.

The first slough arrived when I was transcribing my data in semester 3 of my Masters. I (a) hadn't applied in my Ethics application to use an outside transcription service, (b) I wasn't sure I could afford to pay someone to transcribe all that data, and (c) I would have to proof it all very carefully anyway, because others wouldn't 'hear' correctly unless they were intimately acquainted with the materials.

Boy, was I wrong in not adding transcription services to my ethics application. I lost the will to live for six months. I found it took me one minute to correctly transcribe each second of recording. 

I had fourteen hours of recordings.

Sixty seconds in each minute, so 3600 seconds per hour, which means 50,400 seconds to transcribe. That's 50,400 minutes or 840 hours of my time spent in transcription. Six months of work.

I had estimated it would take two months. ARGH! See what I mean in losing the will to live?

Hot on the heels of my first slough, my second slough arrived in my last semester. My supervisor transferred to another Uni, so could no longer supervise me. I got passed, like a parcel, to another supervisor. The new supervisor was good, and I did already have a brief acquaintanceship with them.

But I had lost eighteen months worth of relationship-building, and I found that very unsettling.

Not ideal, especially in the build-up to my thesis submission.

As a result, my poorest area of my thesis was my findings section (understandably).

So I will be putting more support around myself for my PhD process. Keep tuned to hear what that will be!


Sam

References:

• Alcott, Louisa May (1869). Little Women: or Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy (Fourth Edition, 1915). USA: Orchard House (p. 11)  
• ProvLib (n.d.) Alcott Mid-Twenties 1858. Retrieved 26 September 2015 from http://www.provlib.org/sites/default/files/u6/Alcott%20midtwenties%201858.jpg

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Stepping students into referencing

I was reading an interesting post on the LinkedIn Higher Education group by Bob Ertischek recently. Bob linked to a primer post on referencing by Dr Liz Hardy, called "The Referencing Guide With No Hocus Pocus".

Liz's post is good for international students who are really struggling with the concept of referencing. However, I suspect it might be too simplistic for domestic students.

My students get lots of referencing help from our learning support people in our Library. That helps our domestic students get up to speed REALLY quickly (first semester, first year). However, our international students need a lot more focused attention, including having study buddies, lunchtime seminars and additional targeted resources.

For help with bibliographic entries I like these two tools:

• Massey Uni has an interactive APA guide for students who don't yet know what they are doing at http://owll.massey.ac.nz/referencing/apa-interactive.php
• Curtin Uni's pdf on APA referencing for students who want to refine their technique at http://libguides.library.curtin.edu.au/c.php?g=202308&p=1332729

For teaching students how to reference, I like using Dr Stephen Fox's webinar, which uses Green Eggs and Ham. This is accessible through TurnItIn at http://go.turnitin.com/webcast/dr-seuss-plagiarism.

For international students who have no idea what Green Eggs and Ham is, I put together a part flip book at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Aa2D7oXGABE&feature=youtu.be using my own copy of Green Eggs and Ham and a snip of Garry Foster's reading.


Sam

References:

• Curtin University (n.d.). Referencing: APA 6th-ed. Retrieved 26 September 2015 from http://libguides.library.curtin.edu.au/c.php?g=202308&p=1332729
• Ertischek, Bob (2015). Do your students know how to reference? Retrieved 26 September 2015 from https://www.linkedin.com/grp/post/2774663-6052116405854236675
• Fox, Stephen (2013). Understanding Plagiarism with Help from Dr. Seuss. Retrieved 26 September 2015 from  http://go.turnitin.com/webcast/dr-seuss-plagiarism
• Hardy, Liz (2015). The Referencing Guide With No Hocus Pocus. Retrieved 26 September 2015 from https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/referencing-guide-hocus-pocus-dr-liz-hardy  
• Massey University (n.d.). APA Interactive. Retrieved 26 September 2015 from http://owll.massey.ac.nz/referencing/apa-interactive.php
• Young, Sam (2015). Seuss Green Eggs & Ham, p 12, 1960 (using the voice of Garry Foster). Retrieved 26 September 2015 from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Aa2D7oXGABE&feature=youtu.be

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References. Hmm: how do they weigh?

I have been undertaking Inger Mewburn's edX MOOC, "How to Survive your PhD", and read a great question on the discussion boards by Benton Groves. He asked "Are many peer-reviewed papers overloaded with references just to give the thesis a pass grade based on weight?"

Cherry Stewart replied that she had been advised in her writing to take care with the references that she includes, weighing up how credible the source is, and how much value it adds to the argument being built.

Inger replied that both positions have value, citing Bruno Latour (1987, p. 33) on the subject of pure numbers:

“The effect of references on persuasion is not limited to that of ‘prestige' or ‘bluff’. Again it is a question of numbers. A paper that does not have references is like a child without an escort walking at night in a big city it does not know: isolated, last, anything may happen to it. On the contrary, attacking a paper heavy with [citations] means that the dissenter has to weaken each of the other papers, or will at least be threatened with having to do so, whereas attack a naked paper means that the reader and the author are of the same weight: face to face."

I found this comment really interesting: that Latour was saying that without references, we stand alone. Good point. I think most of us are more used to 'standing on the shoulders of giants' - and citing them.

Inger then uses Latour (1987) to point out that if the author brings out the big guns, and you want to refute that author's arguments, you have to go back and unpeel all the references they have supplied. You have to check and verify that each argument has validity, generalisability and reliability in each instance. You also need to check that the argument is correct, and is used with the original author's true intent.

You may also find that further back, the references all end up citing each other. This is something that today we can determine at a click using GoogleScholar, but that had to be painstakingly manually mapped in Latour's day (1987, Mewburn, 2015).

Additionally, some citations might be 'perfunctory'; that is, included because they are always included. These citations might be part of the normal framework of the field, showing the author's allegiances, and go, therefore, largely unquestioned. That may make them incorrect or irrelevant. But we won't know until we dissect the whole thing.

An enlightening little comment in a busy discussion forum.

Sam

Reference:

• Australia National University & Mewburn, Inger (2015).  How to Survive your PhD: Clear writing produces a fail. Retrieved 22 September 2015 from https://courses.edx.org/courses/course-v1:ANUx+RSIT-01x+3T2015/courseware/312040b356094cc28839c22caea3b6b6/f153d38e5aba49069107a8fbedf363ac/
• Latour, Bruno (1987). Science in Action: How to follow scientists and engineers through society. USA: Harvard University Press.

read more "References. Hmm: how do they weigh?"