Dismissive Reviews: Academe's Memory Hole

Richard Phelps, via a kind email:

"In scholarly terms, a review of the literature or literature review is a summation of the previous research that has been done on a particular topic. With a dismissive literature review, a researcher assures the public that no one has yet studied a topic or that very little has been done on it. A firstness claim is a particular type of dismissive review in which a researcher insists that he is the first to study a topic. Of course, firstness claims and dismissive reviews can be accurate--for example, with genuinely new scientific discoveries or technical inventions. But that does not explain their prevalence in nonscientific, nontechnical fields, such as education, economics, and public policy, nor does it explain their sheer abundance across all fields.

"See for yourself. Access a database that allows searching by phrases (e.g., Google, Yahoo Search, Bing) and try some of these: "this is the first study," "no previous studies," "paucity of research," "there have been no studies," "few studies," "little research," or their variations. When I first tried this, I expected hundreds of hits; I got hundreds of thousands."

Posted by Jim Zellmer at June 11, 2012 4:36 AM
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