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Comment by jannic | Hacker News Reader

I guess the original publication which listed the high iron content of spinach was:

Bunge, G.. 'Weitere Untersuchungen über die Aufnahme des Eisens in den Organismus des Säuglings'. Zeitschrift für Physiologische Chemie, 16 (1892)

http://echo.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/ECHOdocuView?url=/permanent/...

If that's true, then indeed, it was not a misplaced decimal point. Instead, Bunge listed the iron contents of dried food.

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It is interesting that the paper does not actually cite the original paper. I guess it is not critical to the paper, but it does complete the story.

This does bring up a important point in that is old scientific publications in languages other than english. I have many times run into references in German, French or Russian that are only available as low quality scanned pdfs. As a monolingual English speaker these are completely inaccessible to me. I would be great to have all of them OCRed so at least we can run them through Google Translate.

It seems more interesting to me that Rekdal doesn't cite this article:

http://www.bestthinking.com/articles/science/chemistry/bioch...

It's a 2012 followup by Mike Sutton to the two publications from 2010. It contains many new details, including a reference to Bunge (1892).

Perhaps, one should not only try to cite the original source, but also look for recent research on the same topic?

>Perhaps, one should not only try to cite the original source, but also look for recent research on the same topic?

This is (or should be) done standardly by all scientists. It is actually the best way to learn about a field. Find the key paper (or at least the paper the field thinks is key) and then read all the papers that cite that key paper.

I am sure this has been done by somebody, but it would be great to have this citation link structure as a graph where you could click on any node and read the paper.

The problem is that key papers are cited by a LOT of other papers, these with variable quality.

Yes they are, but there is no better way of finding those papers that can’t be found using keyword searches. I have found hundreds of critical papers over the years by using this technique that I would never have found in a thousand years using any other search method.

Take a closer look, Jannic. I did cite that page, created in 2010. The version I referred to was from 20 March 2014 (date also found in the list of references, in line with the requirements of this particular journal)

A small anecdote on this point. I first sent the article to a journal where the editors insisted that I say something about Bunge and the other German scientists involved in the early history. I refused, because it would have taken attention away from the main topic of the article, and sent the article to SSS instead.

Wow. This academic paper we just read on academic urban legends has an urban legend payload - I now believed there was a "misplaced decimal point" (i.e. typo) in a single source, that then became the source of an academic urban legend about spinach.

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