Recently I needed to check – once again – one of the OLD SEMINAL PAPERS. These happens quite often, just to realise that little new of substance has been invented for a very long time (I should change professions and go to mining, maybe I will at least FIND something )…
Anyway, I have been hunting for the 1978 paper of David Sinton on thematic mapping. As always, my search started at Google Scholar:
The reference provided pointed to this source:
Sinton, D. (1978). The inherent structure of information as a constraint to analysis: Mapped thematic data as a case study. Harvard papers on geographic information systems, 6, 1-17.
Now, I know that this resource has been cited in a multitude of manners – never trust the autogenerated references, so I checked a few of the citations from the citing resources – including from some of the people that actually participated at the symposium (and a cream of the cream of GIS):
The paper was presented at one of the first theoretical GIS conferences ever – the First International Advanced Study Symposium on Topological Data Structures for Geographic Information Systems (1977). The proceedings only appeared a year later (1978), in the Harvard Papers on Geographic Information Systems. I knew this, and I was happy to excuse the year discrepancies.
I checked and the University of Melbourne library indeed holds these volumes, a beautiful part of GIS history. Great occasion to get my hands on one, finally. The volumes are in a remote repository (students are probably no more required to dig deep), and I had to apply for them to be retrieved. I applied only for Volume 6, as I really just needed the Sinton paper.
And I got it. Volume 6 – Spatial Algorithms: Efficiency in Theory and Practice did include some gems, including some of the earliest discussions of Topological data handling (two papers from White, M and White, D) and location –based IR (Burton), but NOT Sinton. I went back and requested the full package – and found Sinton’s paper sitting happily in Volume 7!
None of the papers I could quickly find (I did not do an exhaustive search…) cited this paper properly. It seems, therefore, that hardly anyone has actually READ the thing. Sad, sad world…
The correct reference therefore is, for posterity (endnote export):
Reference Type: Conference Proceedings
Author: D. Sinton
Year of Conference: 1977
Title: The Inherent Structure of Information as a Constraint to Analysis: Mapped Thematic Data as a Case Study
Editor: G. Dutton
Conference Name: First International Advanced Study Symposium on Topological Data Structures for Geographic Information Systems
Conference Location: Dedham, MA
Publisher: Laboratory for Computer Graphics and Spatial Analysis
Volume: 7
Number of Volumes: 8
Pages: 1-17
Series Title: Harvard Papers on Geographic Information Systems
Short Title: The Inherent Structure of Information as a Constraint to Analysis: Mapped Thematic Data as a Case Study
Year Published:1978
Note to self – cite volumes properly, it matters – down the track.
Caveat: some authors cite this source as Addision-Weasley. It is possible that this paper has been reprinted. I have not been able to find a single pointer to this, so I doubt so – in particular in the same year…
Spatial Thoughts of Martin Tomko
To be fair many of the papers I found do, in fact, cite the paper as being in volume 7. I think more likely the culprit here is just google scholar’s algorithm for generating bibtex entries from papers. It was incorrectly cited in one or a few articles and then the google algorithm conflated it with others that cite it as volume 6. It is presumptuous to think that just because people mis-cited that they didn’t read the paper. You can still read a paper and then use google scholar to quickly fill in your bibtex file, perhaps erroneously. But if there’s any concern about this, the best solution would be to just to scan a pdf of the paper and make it available online — then people wouldn’t need to search around the stacks of the University of Melbourne library for it.
HI gisuser,
very correct observation. But then – if you had the hardcopy of the paper available ( which is only in a bound volume), you would have an easy way to access the correct citation. So I do not see an excuse for relying on the bibtex from Google Scholar. Scholar warns you about the correctness of their data! A correct referencing is one of the pillars of science – not for acknowledgment (although this seems to be the main use these days, and increasingly so if you move to soft sciences), as much as to be able to refer to data and methods of others (living with a bio-scientist I see how important this is there!). I also think that only a minority of the papers citing this work are “post Google Scholar” era papers – but I may have to check this. What I think is happening is that people may have read it some time ago, many years later think that it is worth to cite, and have troubles to find the right citation. Nothing really wrong and I am certainly guilty of that too. This was more of a mental note to self then anything else ( but it took me a while to find the right answer when searching the document). And I am certianly not going to publish the scan of this – it is not my paper, and I have no time to go and seek permissions from publisher etc.