Stephen Downes

Via a Mastodon post from Alfie Kohn posted today I encountered this great 2014 article on how urban legends are perpetuated in academic writing. The article looks at the chain of commentary around the idea that spinach is a great source of iron (it isn't). You have to  read it carefully: it's a maze of assertions that might be true ("messages that pass through several links have the unfortunate tendency to become modified or altered along the way, as in the whisper game") or might not be ("we are currently experiencing an 'avalanche of low-quality research'"). Even the URL to one of the references in the bibliography (intended to point to Hamblin, 1981) points instead to a study on cocaine on rigid OS (whatever that means). This sort of error is really easy to make I make a point to check the articles being cited in the links I cite - for example, one recent article said there were different types of consciousness, when the original paper said there were different models of consciousness - I posted the correct term, silently correcting the error, but it's a daily occupational hazard.