Down to a 't'

Google Scholar is a very useful tool if you are in the business of research. It's also a nice surprise when you put your own name in and up come your own publications with all the citations listed beneath them. I was very pleased to see that one of the papers I co-wrote with Maged Boulos in 2007 has been cited 77 times. The paper was entitled The Emerging Web 2.0 Social Software and was published in Health Information and Libraries Journal. So I went through a few of the citations just to see what other researchers were saying about our article.

To my amusement, one author had cited me as Wheelert, S. Well, that's me all right, but I had never seen my surname spelt with a 't' on the end. My amusement turned to irritation however, when time after time, other citations also used the same spelling of my surname - Wheelert. In all Google showed 17 incidences of my name being remixed.

So I checked my birth certificate. No, I was born Wheeler. I checked my marriage certificate - something must have happened in the act of getting wed that changed my surname without my knowledge perhaps? No, that happened to my wife instead, so I was still Wheeler. Must have been the article then. No, in the original article we published, our names were spelt correctly too. So ..... it was obvious what had happened. Someone had cited my article and misspelled my name with an extra letter in it by mistake. Then others had come along, without reading my original article and simply lifted the quotation out from the secondary article and had requoted the error in their own article. The error has spread virally. I'm not going to name and shame all the authors here, because that would be churlish - but you can check it out for yourself if you care to. Simply paste this reference into Google and you will see what I mean:

Boulos, K. & Wheelert, S. (2007) The emerging web 2.0 social software

Perhaps I should simply be happy that other people are quoting my publications, I hear you ask? Well, there is a deeper problem here, I retort. If this is happening to my work, how much more endemic is this practice out in the world of academia? How much of this copying and pasting gets past the reviewers? How potentially damaging is this practice to a) the integrity of academic research and b) the veracity and accuracy of what we read in academic journals?

Let me ask a question here. How many of us have actually read the work of Lev Vygotsky directly? And how many of us have quoted from his Mind in Society book without reading it? I did this once or twice myself, I must admit, before I realised my error. Are academic researchers becoming lazy in their literature reviews? And if this copying and pasting is a widespread practice, which I suspect it is, how can we without being hypocrites, expect our students to be more diligent than us? I guess that's academia down to a 't'.

(Image source: www.education.asu.edu)