Bad "scholarly article" needed for information literacy classes

Walt Crawford waltcrawford at GMAIL.COM
Mon Mar 9 19:11:03 EDT 2015


Unfortunately, William Smith's suggestion doesn't meet Stacy's criterion: "
I want one that is bad but written by people who sincerely thought they
were writing a good research article.  " It appeared in The Annals of
Improbable Research, which is to scholarly journals as The Onion is to
journalism.

On Mon, Mar 9, 2015 at 3:12 PM, William Smith <aikidude at gmail.com> wrote:

> http://www.improbable.com/airchives/classical/cat/cat.html :)
>
> On Mon, Mar 9, 2015 at 2:26 PM, Stacy Pober <stacy.pober at manhattan.edu>
> wrote:
>
>> I'm looking for an example of a badly written pseudo-scholarly article to
>> use as an example in an info literacy class.
>>
>> For years, I used a badly written veterinary article that was on the
>> website of a manufacturer of herbal supplements. It claimed to be a report
>> of the results of a double-blind study of their products as used to treat a
>> particular disease but it described a terribly designed study which was not
>> even single-blinded.  It had no bibliography.  It used some of the
>> buzzwords of academia and was co-authored by two veterinarians and the
>> owner of the supplement company. It was a very good example of very awful
>> pseudo-academic writing.
>>
>> Alas, the company has taken the article down from the web.
>>
>> Does anyone have some similarly bad articles they can suggest using?  I
>> am not looking for articles that are written just to prove that one can
>> write badly, and I don't want one of those articles written by an automatic
>> paper generating program.. I know there are some of those on the web. I
>> want one that is bad but written by people who sincerely thought they were
>> writing a good research article.
>>
>> The article I used to use was chosen partly because of the large number
>> of people who linked to it from other websites.  Those other sites were
>> linking to it because they believed it. They were not using it as a bad
>> example.
>>
>> --
>> Stacy Pober
>> Information Alchemist
>> Manhattan College Library
>> Riverdale, NY 10471
>> stacy.pober at manhattan.edu
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