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Comment by muhdeeb | Hacker News Reader

I'm inclined to give them a pass. It's easy enough to figure out that it should be germanium and not gadolinium, and dyslexia already exists among scientists. Context provides enough information to correct the record.

I didn't catch the error the first time around because I autocorrected to Ge--there are only so many anions that can make that formula work and staring at these formulas all day long can make you go cross eyed anyway.

What I think is more dangerous to understanding is skipping formulas in favor of initials! BFO instead of BiFeO3, or BT instead of Bi2Te3, SRO for SrRuO3, LSFO for La0.3Sr0.7FeO3 abbreviations that I think obscure too much detail. You can more easily wander into talking about different things with the same terms. Such abbreviations are already endemic in condensed matter physics.

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> I'm inclined to give them a pass. It's easy enough to figure out that it should be germanium and not gadolinium, and dyslexia already exists among scientists.

People make mistakes and you probably mean well but this is also the sort of pass given that makes scientific research and reporting terrible.

If it's "easy enough to figure out" then it's even more important to get it right -- why should we trust someone who can't even get the "easy" things right?

> ... and dyslexia already exists among scientists.

The article is pointing out a problem that appears to be fairly common, is that really a suitable explanation? Even if it is a suitable explanation, is that a reason for lowering standards, which you can then apply to explain away every mistake?

Keep in mind that proper publications should usually have been reviewed by at least 3 people including the authors (typically more) by the time everyone else gets to read it. So that kind of mistake isn't really acceptable.

> What I think is more dangerous to understanding is skipping formulas in favor of initials! BFO instead of BiFeO3, or BT instead of Bi2Te3, SRO for SrRuO3, LSFO for La0.3Sr0.7FeO3 abbreviations that I think obscure too much detail. You can more easily wander into talking about different things with the same terms. Such abbreviations are already endemic in condensed matter physics.

If you have been trained in scientific writing, you would always introduce an abbreviation. For example, "BiFeO3 (BFO)" and "SrRuO3 (SRO). It's also common to include a list of abbreviation in some forms of scientific writing.

Because this kind of thing almost certainly crops up in the "related work" section, which is a weird section of the paper that doesn't really involve any of the actual core research. It's essentially a tiny little bibliography intended for people who don't know the literature, so it doesn't get the same level of deep care as the original work. I suspect often people copy titles and fragments from their previous papers or from other papers, on the theory that they can only make the section less accurate by adding novelty.

> I'm inclined to give them a pass. It's easy enough to figure out that it should be germanium and not gadolinium, and dyslexia already exists among scientists.

I’m not. If somewhat said Pi was 9.14 I think no one would give it a pass. It’s not like a misspelling. It’s an invalid element which is the chemistry equivalent of an absurdly wrong number in maths.

It's more like saying pi is approximately "3..14". Easily corrected syntax errors aren't as bad as semantic errors.

No. The 9.14 vs. 3.14 analogy is more suitable.

If you have read the blog post it's a difference between the chemical symbol Ge and Gr, which as I understand is what you would refer to as a "semantic error".

But Gr isn't an element so no one would ever misidentify it as part of compound, its obviously a mistake. Like if I said pi was 3.`4

How would the reader know the writer intended Ge instead of Ga? More importantly: why should the burden of figuring that out fall on the reader instead of the writer? Especially when considering that every publication normally has a lot more readers than writers.

In this case, chemistry of Ga and Ge are a bit different, and the Cr compound that was misstated is part of a family of materials that rely heavily on the coordinating chemistry of Ge and its mates in the same period. So it makes more sense. If indeed it were Ga, that would be an interesting compound that probably wouldn't look anything like the material families being discussed by these authors.

I think the reader and the writer share the burden of accurate communication. The reader should ideally come prepared and the writer should provide as best they can. A prepared reader makes quick work of this typo.

Thanks for replying, I understand your original reasoning now in a way that I didn't when I last responded. I was only considering how it would appears to people who don't recognize Gr isn't an element, I agree that it's a syntactic mistake to those who know chemical symbols well.

It should be "someone", not "somewhat".

"Pi" is only capitalized at the start of a sentence.

"no one would give it a pass" is a logically unsound claim, given the number of people on the planet.

How very absurdly wrong of you :)

This is like a “no brown M&M” kind of sloppiness. If they miss this, what other things are they missing?

The typo is not the problem; it's that the typo is evidence of academic dishonesty.

When you make a citation, it means you cracked open the original work, understood what it says and located a relevant passage to reference in your work.

The authors are propagating the same typo because they are not copying the original correct text; they are just copying ready-made citations of that text which they plant into their papers to manufacture the impression that they are surveying other work in their area and taking it into account when doing their work.

They survey one or two works, and then just steal their citations to make it look like they also surveyed 19 other works.

Problem is, the citations in those words are already copies of borrowed citations from some other paper, which copied some of them from another paper and that was the honest one that made a typo in a genuine, organically grown citation.

Just because you propagated a typo that does not mean you didn't see the original. It could just mean that you saw the typo more recently and that's what stuck in your mind as you were busy writing.

It's not academic dishonesty.

When you read plenty of papers you aren't going to read them again to cite them. You take them from your read.bib file.

Also citations generally don't link to a passage. They are pointers to an entire paper.

> When you read plenty of papers you aren't going to read them again to cite them.

But in fact I do exactly that, exactly because experience has taught me that my memory of what is in a paper is fallible and I should at least cursorily review what I'm citing. In a few cases I've even just deleted something entirely because my premise was based on a recollection of what I intended to cite that was subtly wrong enough to fatally undermine my entire thesis.

I'm not saying you have to read an entire paper over completely every time you cite it but at least pulling it up and reviewing the parts that are informing your argument is definitely a best practice.

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