Bad "scholarly article" needed for information literacy classes

[Stacy Pober]

Eureka - I found that my favorite bad article is living at a new URL!

Here it is for anyone interested:

http://www.azmira.com/support/study-evaluation-of-feline-leukemia-protocols.pdf

I like it because I want something that has clear deficiencies that a class
can see without having to do a lot of close reading. I usually point out
things like the fact that the main author is the person who manufactures
the herbal supplements being evaluated, that there is no literature review
section or bibliography, and the internal contradiction of a purported
"double blind" study where the groups are treated differently in just about
every way.

Thanks to all for their suggestions.

Stacy

On Mon, Mar 9, 2015 at 5:26 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
>



-- 
Stacy Pober
Information Alchemist
Manhattan College Library
Riverdale, NY 10471
stacy.pober at manhattan.edu

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2015-03-11
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