Gale Research Guides.

The Debka "news" site.

Alas, the NYPD cited them as the source for a dirty bomb scare in NYC.

In genealogy: Roderick Stuart, Royalty for Commoners. (The first edition was recalled by the publisher. The more recent ones are slightly better, but still bad. There's one place where he conflated three women, who thus has been given two marriages after her death.)

Suetonius, uncorroborated, on historical infotainment.

Anything published or endorsed by the Discovery Institute.

Herbert Norris's Medieval Costume and Fashion". Norris's books are everywhere, they're wonderfully illustrated, and they generally contain few-to-no references to actual sources or artwork of the period.

Bryson's The Mother Tongue.

Anything that has won an Ignobel prize.

I'd be suspicious of anything that cited something in "BMC Complementary and Alternative Medicine" http://www.biomedcentral.com/bmccomplementalternmed or any other similar journal.

Going on the evidence I'd be really suspicious of any article that involves statistics and where no author is a statistician. This applies to fields as diverse as climate change, sociology and biology but it is hard to identify such papers in advance, we just have to wait until some statistician has a look at them and finds the error.

David Foster Wallace's Signifying Rappers.

Norman Davies' Europe.

World Book Encyclopedia

I'm on a couple of program committees for academic conferences about computer security and privacy. This year I realized that this gave me advance notice of new bad sources, when I found a couple of really grotesque howlers in people's related works sections, only to find that they had cited the same incredibly misinformed survey paper, published last year in an obscure workshop that none of my colleagues had actually heard of.

Just to make sure I hadn't gone crazy, I showed sections from the survey paper to the authors of the original papers surveyed, to see whether they would recognize their own systems. None did, except to say, "That sounds a little like [my design], only broken and stupid."

The sad part was that, by relying on the Bad Survey Paper, the authors had failed to realize that others had done what they were trying to do years ago, and done it better.

On the off chance that anybody else cares about the field (hi, Xeger!), Chothia and Chatzikokolakis's 2006 survey of anonymous p2p is not to be trusted, and serves no good purpose other than spotting authors who don't read primary sources.

I'm not sure yet if there's a general way to spot unreliable sources of this kind.

Anything with a PublishAmerica or AuthorHouse logo on the spine.

The sad thing is, there may be one or two decent works among the dregs, but there's no guarantee that the good stuff (rather though it may be) has been properly edited or reviewed.

Also see http://www.badscience.net/?p=477

Citing anything in the journal "Medical Hypotheses" looks like a prime case for automatic junking

What, nobody mentioned Wikipedia yet?

(Okay, so it's not a scholary work)

Anything by Barry Fell.

Re: #8: Ouch! I'd like to protest your proposed rule does not hold true for all IgNobel prizewinners. Some of them? Yes, absolutely. (L. Ron's on that list, after all.) But not all of them. Ig Nobel-winning reports have been published in journals like Nature and The Lancet. The research doesn't have to be badly done or actively misleading to win the prize. It just has to make you laugh -- and then make you think.

I've been involved with the Igs since 2000 or so -- and really, I promise, "objectively bad science" is not what gets looked at in selecting the winners.

Every comp sci author (too numerous to mention) who cites Christopher Alexander's work on design patterns when they have obviously never read any of his books much less grokked their essence.

The 21 Lessons of Merlin, and, for anything historical rather than spiritual, Starhawk's The Spiral Dance. She was unfortunately still using the "9 million dead witches" figure and suchlike silliness.

Drabble, Margaret, ed. The Oxford Companion to English Literature (any edition) for anything after the death of Queen Vic. Some of it's ok, some of it's not, and only a specialist can really tell the difference.

Arguments about the exact progress of post-Civil War engagements involving the US military that rely upon the West Point Military Atlas series.

Churchill, Winston S. The Second World War.

Virtually any "constitutional history," particularly those by or citing Levy, that is not written by someone with a JD or LLB. Sorry, historians and political scientists, but procedural posture really does make a difference in understanding both constitutional texts and interpretation of constitutional texts, and y'all just don't have the background to understand it.

And here's one that I'll probably get in trouble for: any portion of Nimmer on Copyright that concerns itself with historical development. It's not a mark of shame, unfortunately — but it is unreliable for historical analysis (and even facts, but that's another issue entirely).

Anything from Regnery Publishing

Joseph P. Swain's The Broadway Musical: A Critical and Musical Survey

The problem is not that Dr. Swain treats the Broadway musical with academic rigor. When Stephen Banfield does it, the result is inevitably insightful. I wouldn't mind seeing more of it. The problem is that the book reads like Dr. Swain has no clue how a musical is actually written (or re-written, really).

Dr. Swain approaches each work as if its goal was to be a fully integrated, large-scale musical form. This means, in some cases, he's trying to discern a structure which isn't there. Or he takes authors to task for failing at something they never intended. e.g., the music which comprises the dream ballet in Oklahoma is a medley, most likely improvised by the rehearsal pianist while Agnes deMille was choreographing.

Not surprisingly, the works which actually are fully integrated, large-scale musical forms fare best under his analysis (and those chapters have some value). However, the book, taken by itself, may lead people to think that one writes a musical the same way one writes a symphony. Or that the ideal that musical writers aim at is an overarching large scale structure.

The Reason Foundation is another group to avoid citing in anything approaching a serious paper or article.

A few years ago they published some "study" that they claimed would greatly improve safety on our interstates, by paving over all the medians and requiring large trucks to use those lanes. They'd be separated from all the other traffic by barriers and there would be one lane in each direction for them.

After looking at their "study" and its attached drawings, I sent a letter to their site listing my (many) concerns I had with it and how I felt that it had several critical and fatal errors in it. I got a response back from the author, who tried to handwave off my concerns, and when he couldn't, just labeled me argumentative and refused to talk with me any further.

John (21): All the medians? With barriers? But that would ...

Oy.

My thesis? :)

As for bad books - I would personally avoid anything that refers to the author of Pride and Prejudice as 'Miss Austen' because that sets my teeth on edge, though I realize that's throwing out many Grand Old Men Of Literary Criticism with the bathwater.

Adelle Davis on medicine or nutrition:

Let's Eat Right to Keep Fit
Let's Cook It Right
Let's Stay Healthy
Let's Have Healthy Children
Let's Get Well
You Can Get Well

#10 ::: Lighthill commented:
On the off chance that anybody else cares about the field (hi, Xeger!), Chothia and Chatzikokolakis's 2006 survey of anonymous p2p is not to be trusted, and serves no good purpose other than spotting authors who don't read primary sources.

Heh. I was about to write and ask if we knew eachother... but I believe that solidly answers the question :)

I'm not sure yet if there's a general way to spot unreliable sources of this kind.

I've lately developed a profound irritation about people who can't seem to cite anything more recent than ~10 years ago on topics that change so much that work done 10 -months- ago may not be valid any longer. Again - it tends to mean that their work is based on functionally unreliable sources, as well as being painfully out of touch with the current state-of-the-... well - art will do.

Scholars citing John and Caitlín Matthews on Arthurian literature make the baby Taliesin cry.

Colin Wheildon, Type And Layout. Very bad legibility studies.

Gregg Easterbrook, A Moment On The Earth. Claims that the Exxon Valdez oil spill was no big deal because he took a boat trip throught the area a few years later, and it looked fine to him.

"Das Ende des Hitler-Mythos" (various translations) Joseph Greiner, Zurich, 1947. A purported memoir. Greiner claims to have been a close friend of Hitler during the period 1907-1908, when they were both living in Vienna, and again in 1913. Many historians, notably Bullock and Trevor-Roper, relied on him for evidence of Hitler's family relationships and personal habits during this period. But detailed work with the Vienna records and conflict with other reliable sources has established that it's nothing more than a rehash of gossip Greiner heard before the war, plus hot air. He almost certainly never knew Hitler personally; yet Greiner is still quoted occasionally as "eyewitness" testimony. Worse, the works of the historians who relied on him and drew conclusions about Hitler from what Greiner said about his Vienna years, are still extant. There's no way to call them back.

Is that the sort of thing you mean?

as most of my own research is conducted in bookstores, i avoid the business, self-help, and bestseller sections for pretty much the same reason: conventional wisdom is seldom wise. books with "leaders" or "leadership" in the title are as bad as books with "prophecy" or "diet".

LOL about regnery - i'm currently clearing copy permission on one of their texts for a professor. the guilty shall remain nameless.

Anything by:
David Barton, especially (a)historical quotes attributed to founding fathers.

Paul Cameron, anthing about teh gays

Concur with earlier posts on Discovery Institute and Regnery Press.

Are there *any* books that are (say) over a century old and still useful as scholarly works? I'd imagine citing Gibbon would get you into trouble with an ancient historian; similarly, I'd be very suspicious of anyone that used The Golden Bough for a discussion of the development of religon.* Most science texts will have been superseded.

It also depends slightly on what you use these books for; The Second World War has its uses as a primary source, but you'd want to check its assertions very hard against modern scholarship or other primary sources.

C.E. Petit #18: Are the West Point maps off, or the descriptions, or both? And why only post-civil-war?

*Which reminds me: I gather that anything that Robert Graves wrote on mythology is deeply suspect, however good the *stories* may be.

Anything by Herbert Norris, including Medieval Costume and Fashion, Ancient Costume and Fashion, and Tudor Costume and Fashion. Contrary to popular belief, Herbert Norris is not a primary source. Nor an accurate source. While as a field medieval textiles cannot use the stricter temporal guidelines common to other areas of study, if it hasn't been written in the last 30 years and isn't a translation/republication of a primary source, please consider throwing it out the window.

Boucher's 20,000 Years of Fashion - This is a lovely pointing book with lots of pretty pictures. However, the lack of citations for mass generalizations should drive many to drink. A citation to this book is not sufficent for anything. Find the primary source.

I should go find the working list. I think it got packed with the books to be sold back.

Xeger, what you sometimes see in lit studies are scholars who are still unashamedly working from corrupt old editions. Some old editions of Shakespeare are remarkably bad.

I still have a bright spot in my memory for a critical edition of the poetry of John Cleveland where the first third of the book (and not a thin one, either) was a beautifully clear and informative discussion of the many pirate editions of Cleveland, the circumstances of their publication, how you could trace the descent of texts from one edition to another via typos and misattributed additional poems picked up along the way, and, finally, which poems they had included or excluded and why. It culminated in a sort of genealogical chart showing which pirate editions of Cleveland were typeset from which other editions. It was a lovely piece of scholarship, and I can't imagine any lesser effort making sense of and cleaning up Cleveland's variant texts and misattributed works.

so, those of you mentioning Norris: is the correct action in this situation to first see if Janet Arnold has written anything about the topic?

Dave @ 28 - which reminds me, anything by David Irving. IIRC, even Wikipedia discounts him as a source....

TNH @ 35:

what you sometimes see in lit studies

Well, yes, because you can't see anything in an unlit study....

*rimshot*

Jakob @ 31

Are there *any* books that are (say) over a century old and still useful as scholarly works? I'd imagine citing Gibbon would get you into trouble with an ancient historian; similarly, I'd be very suspicious of anyone that used The Golden Bough for a discussion of the development of religon.* Most science texts will have been superseded.

Context is everything: We referred to Gibbon in my various Roman history courses not for his conclusions, but for his chronologies, which were just fine, and also because one of the themes in at least one of my courses was that the study of history is itself a product of the time and civilization in which the study takes place. I would say that if a scholar's research ends with Gibbon, he's not to be taken seriously. If it begins with Gibbon, and goes from there to the primary sources and more recent research, it may have some value.

Likewise, Frazer is a not-bad source for the stories and for a comparative look at certain myths; however, you can't just read The Golden Bough and stop there. Unless, you're analyzing Frazer's analysis, I suppose, perhaps. I'd say a serious look at the development of religion would not reference only Frazer, but it might reference Frazer among others. A book about the study of the development of religion might reference Frazer heavily.

Jakob @ 31

Yes, there are. Many works were only translated into English by bored/interested Victorian/Edwardian scholars. So the most recent translation of the Seanchus Mor (mentally add leintions), the old Irish law text, was 1911. The seminal works on renaissance underwear are of the same era...full of errors, but there aren't many people intersted in writing about underwear and its still the acknowledged authority. When it comes to medieval/renaissance scholarship much has been done in the last 30 years, but we haven't covered everything yet. So we still use the old sources.

Someday, maybe, I'll get enough Old Irish to be able to translate the Seanchus Mor again. It might be a retirement project.

Avoid any work on the Canterbury Tales that takes them at face value, and believes that Chaucer's opinions of his characters were the same as those of Chaucer the pilgrim narrator.

Oo oo oo how about anything described by the author as "a very serious, thoughtful, argument that has never been made in such detail or with such care"

I think this is my favorite Making Light post in a while, thanks!

Regarding the "how to spot a bad book when you aren’t already familiar with the literature in that field" part of this post, I would love to see some comments. Aside from "google is your friend" and the always good advice "check for association with known white nationalists" (I'm looking at you Irving), what else do you do?

In Tolkien scholarship, the never-to-be-cited works are:

Anything by David Day.

The Languages of Middle-earth by Ruth Noel.

The biography by Michael White.

The biography by Daniel Grotta, except for the few places he actually uses unique primary sources.

It is permitted to cite Robert Giddings and the anthology he edited (J.R.R. Tolkien: This Far Land), but only to point out how idiotic it is (except for the essay by Diana Wynne Jones, which is actually good and was evidently included by mistake).

31: Clausewitz is still useful; at least, Gen Rupert Smith wrote an entire book (The Utility of Force) building on/disagreeing with him. But I don't think he's been superseded.

36: "You won't read anything better in a lit study. And in an unlit study it's too dark to read" - thanks to Groucho Marx.

Robert Graves's The White Goddess as a critical or historical insight into anything other than How Robert Graves Thought About Writing Poetry (or, possibly, into of one of the more colorful ways to have post-Great-War PTSD.)

The White Goddess by Robert Graves. It's an interesting approach to history but 'fanciful' doesn't begin to cover it.

Can anyone tell me if the CIA World Factbook is generally reliable?

Screwed up the html tag. The quote in gold is meant to link to a critisism of Jonah Gold's eventually-to-be-published Liberal Fascism (sub title unknown)

I suppose that many of the books on this list may be good in parts; the difficulty for the non-expert is in separating the good from the bad.

jennie1ofmany #37: Indeed, the more meta you get the more use you can make of any text :) I meant rather works whose conclusions are still broadly substantiated by current scholarship.

Another thought: anything that uses the KJV as an accurate translation of the original scriptures - see the discussion above about good and bad parts.

Blast it, beaten!

DBratman @ 41

I've been stung by David Day myself. I'll stick to Shippey next time.

#24: I'll have to add Gillian McKeith, who has, inter alia, claimed that raw vegetables help digestion through photosynthesis in the gut.

I concur with the trading standards authority, who have forced her to remove the title "doctor" from her dietary supplements range. Sadly, they seem to be impotent when it comes to books, web sites, TV programmes, etc.

Who's Who in Science Fiction and the first edition of The Rolling Stone Record Guide are both riddled with grotesque factual errors. (The latter is also riddled with arrogance and judgmental laziness that is laughable in retrospect, but that's probably outside the purview of this discussion.)

Teresa, have you read Marvin Mudrick's dissection of John Gardner's Chaucer "biography"?

William Manchester's A World Lit Only By Fire. A terrible, terrible book by an otherwise good historian. Alas, the enthusiastic reviews of it on Amazon as the cure for all that dry, scholary writing. I enjoy a good papal orgy story as much as the next person, but it's not a replacement for facts.

#33 ::: Teresa Nielsen Hayden commented:
I still have a bright spot in my memory for a critical edition of the poetry of John Cleveland where the first third of the book (and not a thin one, either) was a beautifully clear and informative discussion of the many pirate editions of Cleveland, the circumstances of their publication, how you could trace the descent of texts from one edition to another via typos and misattributed additional poems picked up along the way, and, finally, which poems they had included or excluded and why. It culminated in a sort of genealogical chart showing which pirate editions of Cleveland were typeset from which other editions. It was a lovely piece of scholarship, and I can't imagine any lesser effort making sense of and cleaning up Cleveland's variant texts and misattributed works.

Neat! I don't suppose you'd happen to have a reference to that edition? I quite like the idea of chasing descent like that.

Come to think of it, #10 ::: Lighthill, it might be outright fun to do a geneology of privacy and crypto misconceptions...

Jakob in 31 --

Saw a cite of Snorri's Edda recently which noted that Snorri had access to more and better material than any modern on the subject of Norse Myth.

Can't say as I'd disagree with that, and Snorri is 13th century.

Pretty much anything in the fields of city planning and urban design, including Christopher Alexander's work on pattern language. (Apologies to Lance Weber @ 16.) Wonderful professions, both, but their theoretical underpinnings tend to reflect more hope than science....

#40- Thought on how to tell things not in your field.

Partially a time thing. How fast is the field moving? The basic rule of thumb is 10 years, but comp sci, we all know that everything changes much more rapidly than ancient history. Adjust your time perimeters accordingly.

Other thoughts- not always true, but generally.

Amazon has a citation feature. If the book is widely cited, you're probably ok.

If it is published by a scholarly press, you're probably ok. University Of **** Press is the easy way, but make yourself familar with the other big, multidiciplinary publishers. Ashgate. Boydell and Brewer. Blackwell. McGraw-Hill. Harcourt? Brill. Wikipedia has a list of university presses that doesn't seem to be too bad.

Articles in journals- how long has the journal been running? Forever and a day? You're probably ok. Is it based out of an academic institution? Is it peer-reviewed? Again, probably ok.

but comp sci, we all know that everything changes much more rapidly than ancient history should be "but we all know that comp sci changes much more rapidly than ancient history." My apologies.

I suppose that many of the books on this list may be good in parts; the difficulty for the non-expert is in separating the good from the bad.

Along that line, I find it useful to approach with caution any book mustering copious amounts of primary-source data in the service of a Grand Theory of Everything. In my experience, Grand Theories of Everything mostly don't work (or, as the linguist Edward Sapir put it, "all grammars leak"), and a scholar in full pursuit of a Grand Theory of Everything is in a prime position to be seduced into over-interpreting his or her data. On the other hand, they tend to collect an awful lot of it, and can be downright obsessive-compulsive about their footnotes and bibliographies.

Jakob (31): John Aubrey, Brief Lives. Over three hundred years old, and still cited.

Brewer's Dictionary of Modern Phrase and Fable. I'm sure much of it is accurate, but many of the entries are either misleading or completely inadequate. IIRC, Terry Pratchett was described as a writer of humorous fantasy whose characters often have unusual names. Not inaccurate, but not terribly helpful either...

Lance Weber @16:

Every comp sci author (too numerous to mention) who cites Christopher Alexander's work on design patterns when they have obviously never read any of his books much less grokked their essence.

How true.

I say this as a computer scientist who has never even read any of Alexander's work, but is of the opinion that anyone who refers to it is just trying to detract from the success of Gamma, Helm, Johnson and Vlissides by pointing out that they borrowed the idea from somebody else.

Obviously said gang of four get a free pass on this one. :)

Janet Hitchman's appalling biography of Dorothy L. Sayers, Such a Strange Lady.

Also, rather unfortunately, The Lord Peter Wimsey Companion--the second edition in particular. Not so much that the information is bad, but the citations to the LordPeter mailing list aren't done correctly (and the archives aren't available to the public so they're useless to non-members anyhow) and I know of at least one entry that was lifted wholesale from a post to the list and not given proper credit--and I suspect there are more, but don't own a copy to check.

Scraps (50), I have indeed. Both works were amusing, though Mudrick is more reliably amusing than Gardner. (49) Was Who's Who in Science Fiction the subject of that memorable description, "More errors than words"?

#24 - I always thought of Adele Davis as a faddist, but when I had my third kidney stone in 1991, and my sister offered me a bit of advice from Davis, I took it. Specifically, I was facing the prospect of giving up calcium, green vegetables, and most nuts in order to avoid that transcendent 5 am pain every year or two, and for reasons selfish (no cheese again? EVER?) and healthy (sacrifice the health of my bones to avoid some pain?), I had decided to keep on as I was and put up with the pain events.

Taking magnesium supplements, though, seemed worth trying. According to Davis, it allowed the calcium to pass out of the body in tiny bits instead of staying behind to form little planetoids. Perhaps it's a coincidence, but I haven't had another stone. (I've asked a half dozen doctors what they think of this, and they all seem to think it's interesting enough to make a hum sound while looking somewhere else.)

So I'm grateful to Davis, and glad that, for whatever reason, she had one piece of good advice in there, and that I took it. Oh, and stop me if you've heard this one.

Q: What did Euell Gibbons die of?
A: Natural causes!

#34 Even Arnold has errors. I am told that this is because some of her books contain unchecked work done by graduate students--this applies mostly to some of the reconstructions and analyses of specific garments, or so my sources claim.

#55 on Amazon citations--a lot depends on who'd citing a book and what they know about the field.

In the area of historic costuming, almost all popular and widely-circulated books are suspect--in this field, the best sources do their own research using primary sources, do not repeat the work of others without some critical examination and discussion of same, and tend to be concentrated in a fairly narrow area, rather than being a general survey of historic clothing. This means that most of the books on this topic found in most non-academic libraries or for sale from non-specialist sources are dubious.
Also, beware of books on historic clothing by people whose primary credential is that they have worked for many years as costumers for movies, television and the theater. Some may be good, some may be good in specific areas where the author has done a good bit of work and weak in others, and some are bad all over. You won't know unless you already know a lot about the topic to begin with.

Anything by Margaret Murray

Anyone who slavishly agrees with her.

In wildlife biology circles: Farley Mowat's Never Cry Wolf. He just made a lot of it up. My first day in field biology in the Boundary Waters, our prof filled us in on that one ... then years later I endured a panel of Lit profs who studied nature writing bleating about how betrayed the felt because it had a "nonfiction" label on it. My response was -- "If you're going to study nature and literature, shouldn't you have a basic understanding of the biology?"

anything that uses the KJV as an accurate translation of the original scriptures

I once read a wonderful comment -- perhaps by Jaraslov Pelikan? I'm not sure -- which pointed out that it was unlikely that God and his angels and his saints actually sounded like 17th century Englishmen. The KJV is, however, marvelous poetry sometimes.

However, not being a scholar in the field, I am curious -- what English translation, if any, comes closest to accuracy? Is there such? I don't wish to hijack the thread, so a response to my e-mail would be fine.

#34 Even Arnold has errors. I am told that this is because some of her books contain unchecked work done by graduate students--this applies mostly to some of the reconstructions and analyses of specific garments, or so my sources claim.

#55 on Amazon citations--a lot depends on who'd citing a book and what they know about the field.

In the area of historic costuming, almost all popular and widely-circulated books are suspect--in this field, the best sources do their own research using primary sources, do not repeat the work of others without some critical examination and discussion of same, and tend to be concentrated in a fairly narrow area, rather than being a general survey of historic clothing. This means that most of the books on this topic found in most non-academic libraries or for sale from non-specialist sources are dubious.
Also, beware of books on historic clothing by people whose primary credential is that they have worked for many years as costumers for movies, television and the theater. Some may be good, some may be good in specific areas where the author has done a good bit of work and weak in others, and some are bad all over. You won't know unless you already know a lot about the topic to begin with.

#34 Even Arnold has errors. I am told that this is because some of her books contain unchecked work done by graduate students--this applies mostly to some of the reconstructions and analyses of specific garments, or so my sources claim.

#55 on Amazon citations--a lot depends on who'd citing a book and what they know about the field.

In the area of historic costuming, almost all popular and widely-circulated books are suspect--in this field, the best sources do their own research using primary sources, do not repeat the work of others without some critical examination and discussion of same, and tend to be concentrated in a fairly narrow area, rather than being a general survey of historic clothing. This means that most of the books on this topic found in most non-academic libraries or for sale from non-specialist sources are dubious.
Also, beware of books on historic clothing by people whose primary credential is that they have worked for many years as costumers for movies, television and the theater. Some may be good, some may be good in specific areas where the author has done a good bit of work and weak in others, and some are bad all over. You won't know unless you already know a lot about the topic to begin with.

Barbara Walker's Women's Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets and The Woman's Dictionary of Symbols and Sacred Objects.

OK, as I recall, on many things, but enough mistakes that I would verify anything I found in here before using it anywhere, let alone in an academic paper.

It should be noted that these are secondary/tertiary sources, and I've never met a book of this sort that didn't have some errors. I just remember being disgusted with some of the errors some twenty years ago.

I was in the middle of reading Atlas Shrugged when I went to the AHA convention with my dad while I was in college. He forbade me to mention it to any of the historians in attendance or to ask any questions inspired by it at any of the talks I went to.

as I've grown older, I've come to realize that that may very well have been one of the only two or three wise or helpful things he ever told me.

There are, I think, three kinds of older texts that are still worth using/necessary to know.

First you have those essential works that have not yet been superseded -- grammars, dictionaries, concordances, scholarly editions of primary sources, and the like. Then you have the groundbreaking foundational works that aren't where the field is at any more, but that you need to be familiar with in order to understand how things got to where they are now -- Sapir and Whorf in linguistics, for example. And then you have the works that are literary artifacts in their own right -- like Gibbon or, in a perverse sort of way, Robert Graves.

Biblical Archaeology Review

On literature, anything by O.R. Dathorne on Caribbean literature (a reference to Elizabeth Bishop in one of Derek Walcott's poems, for example, was glossed as a reference to Queen Elizabeth I 'who also wrote poetry').

In my own (I admit, highly specialised) area of interest, one book that should not only be avoided, but pulped is Scott B. MacDonald Trinidad and Tobago: Democracy and Development in the Caribbean. When I was doing my dissertation field research, I asked one of my interview subjects, a former president of the republic, if he had read it. He told me 'no'. I said 'You might be interested to know that in it you're described as a white Creole'. When he stopped laughing he said 'I've been in the sun too long.'* And that was the least of MacDonald's errors.

I'd add that anyone reading J.A. Froude's The English in the West Indies, or The Bow of Ulysses for anything except Froude's beliefs and prejudices would be seriously misguided.**

On another subject dear to my heart: anything by Leo Strauss on Machiavelli should be highly suspect. Strauss's theory of exoteric versus esoteric meanings, and his applied numerology are gigantic problems. This goes double for Harvey Mansfield's work on Machiavelli. I should add Mark Hulliung's work to the list, though for different reasons: Hulliung sees Machiavelli as regurgitating Polybius.

* A Trinidadian sociologist of immense repute told me that his father had also been turned into a white man.

** That's not just because Froude is racist, though he is, but because he gets the most simple things wrong (for example, his description of the Morant Bay Rebellion in Jamaica and the execution of Assembly member George William Gordon manages to garble every single fact).

Jakob @31

My Japan Studies library is sadly shut up in a box somewhere several states away. Ah the tragedy of going from five available bookcases (several double-wide) to two and a half smaller ones.

But until the last few years, there were huge gaps in cultural, folktale, and religious knowledge in Japan studies. A lot of the only original research and translation of this stuff had been done in the late 1800s. Heck, in the 70s there was a lot of stuff that existed only in those old British and German survey books... it had never actually been written down in Japanese, and only existed as oral tradition or common knowledge (Or worse: heavily biased Chinese scholarship about Japanese culture. As bad as the west might have been at understanding Japan, China somehow managed to be far worse.)

To illustrate, look for books on Shinto. Before the anime revolution in around '96, there is very little written on the subject.

Now I see that about eight or nine books on Shinto have come out in the last four years or so. I'm a bit frightened to go have a look at them.

What I find most tragic is when the most notable public scholarship on a work is extremely wrongheaded in a number of significant ways. I have a longstanding annoyance with Susan J Napier. She is a Japanese Literature scholar who has started to work on anime. Her work on anime is adequate, though it serves to reinforce some patently untrue stereotypes, and fails utterly to acknowledge, reference, or mention certain very important works and creators.

The main problem I have with her work is that she massively fails to understand fandom at all - how it works, how it started, what drives it, even such fundamental things as what the gender makeup of anime fandom is.

I remember nearly throwing her book up against the wall several times during my last research paper. At one point she described the anime fandom as 70-80% male basing this largely off the survey she did of a single anime club at a Texas technical college. This was during the late 90s/early 00s, when anyone actually IN the greater fandom could have told you the split was closer to gender equality.

An Otakon staffer from the years she reference in her book actually got me some of their registration numbers by gender breakdown: it was somewhere between 45/55 and 40/60. Hardly the overwhelming majority she had attempted to portray. I'm not saying con attendance is the clearest measurement for gender, but it's sure as heck going to be more accurate than club attendance at technical colleges.

I could go on and on. Most of Napier is quite respectable, but anything she writes on anime fandom is likely to be deeply flawed. Hopefully in ten years I'll be laughing at this post and pointing you towards a score of books with good information about the interaction between the Western Fandom and Japanese culture.

Right now I instead gape in horror at the fact that she has a book coming out soon on amazon called "From Impressionism to Anime: Japan as Fantasy and Fan Cult in the Mind of the West."

The fact that she uses the term "fan cult" rather than "fandom" sets off my warning buzzers. There's gonna be a lot of wall-throwing if I ever decide to read this thing.

Stephen Wolfram's A New Kind of Science.

I'd warn against anything published by University Press of America. They're an, ahem, subsidy publisher.

I've always found that when the first part is a long explanation by the author of how incredibly brave he's being by publishing such a revolutionary piece of work, and it will no doubt cause him to be shunned by the cowardly academic community who cannot allow such a radical overturning of their field, but he must do it all the same for Truth! that is a fairly good guide to works one ought not to trust overly.

Iris Chang's The Rape of Nanking has a justifiably terrible reputation. It's not as if you have to make up shit to make the Japanese look bad there, you know?

Equally, quoting Mao: the Unknown Story without *substantial* back-up or qualifications is not a great idea.

Much as I love them, you probably couldn't get away with citing Norwich's Byzantium trilogy in any serious conversation, I suspect, though I know very little about the field there.

Then there's the books which a serious student should have read, but which will fuck-up anyone who reads them as their first or only source. I'm thinking of Taylor's typically gadflyish and remarkably wrong Origins of the Second World War here, f'instance.

In a lot of academic fields, a useful sign of crankery is gaps in the bibliography, particularly the absence of secondary sources after 1900, or 1920, or 1945, or whatever. If the main text has blanket dismissals of everything after such a threshold, it's crankery. Even in fields where one may disagree strenuously with some or all of the major trends, there's inevitably going to be good work going on that a genuine scholar will want to take into account.

#8: I'd be suspicious of anything that cited something in "BMC Complementary and Alternative Medicine" http://www.biomedcentral.com/bmccomplementalternmed or any other similar journal.

And I suspect this is a kneejerk response to the phrase "complementary and alternative medicine". BMC-CAM is a peer-reviewed journal from a reputable publisher and has been around long enough to guess at an impact factor. It's also OA, so you can read any article it publishes and see for yourself what quality of work they accept. Having bothered to do that with the latest edition, I don't see what the problem is.

Lizzy L @ 67: I'm partial to the New Jewish Publication Society translation, for two reasons:

(1) The footnotes point out where the Hebrew translation is uncertain (e.g., most of the Book of Job) or when significant non-canonical manuscripts (e.g., from the Samaritans) have different wording.

(2) The translation was done by a committee that included Orthodox, Reform, and Conservative Jews. Only Divine Providence could have prevented those committee meetings from degenerating into shouting matches.

I don't know what translations Christian scholars prefer, but I hear that the New International Version gets a bad rap for choosing ease-of-reading over accuracy, and that both the Living Bible and the Jehovah's Witnesses' translation (don't remember the name) were done by people who couldn't actually read the source language.

If documentaries count, then surely Disney's "White Wilderness," with its suicidal lemmings, is a classic of the untrustworthy sources genre.

Yikes! nailed by the double posting monster.

I shall type slowly so it doesn't happen with this post.

#31 Jakob

I concur with the responses in #s 37, 38, 42,53,58, and doubtless others, as experts in specialized fields speak out. There are people who have done work in specific areas who did so much, and such thorough, work that they can't be evaded by those who come after, no matter how long ago they worked. Among Roman historians, classical scholars have to consider not only to work of Gibbon, but also that of Theodor Mommsen: it is possible to disagree with their conclusions, but because they did so much research into the topic to begin with, you can't ignore them.

I would also add (for the benefit of the general reader, as Jakob knows this quite well, I'm sure) that some earlier scholars, like the Victorian translators mentioned above by Sisuile, may have done sound basic work, although some of the conclusions they derived from it have been called into question by later scholars, simply because the later workers were able to work with a larger body of information that the earlier scholar had access to--old documents are regularly being found or restored. In these cases, the translations are often quite good, even if the conclusions the earlier scholar drew from them about the society that produced them are now considered doubtful.

It's good idea, when looking at historical writing, to be careful around writers with a strong nationalistic bent--19th and early 20th century European scholars are often problematic here, especially ones who were operating as a minority in a larger state and had a particular axe or two to grind. American writers of history even now are not immune from this weakness, as has been noted by those who mentioned Regnery Press, although even good scholars have prejudices they fail to master--do not trust Bernard DeVoto on Mormons...

Even a good scholar can succumb to this, and see their material through glasses strongly colored by their angle on a topic, with some resulting distortion--see Basil Liddell Hart's works. It's easier to avoid being led astray when you know that writer has a specific preoccupation.

Also: Be wary of any book on an historical topic who announces Astonishing! Earth-shattering! discoveries that will Turn the World of ______________ Upside-down! Especially if they make it onto talk shows. I'm just saying.

Leah, as someone who has started to become interested in anime, what are the good sources?

Teresa @ 22:

Yeah, their proposal was on the long distance interstate routes, like I-95, I-40, I-75, etc, converting the grass medians into truck-only lanes separated by barriers would provide more efficient movement of goods and improved safety for everyone.

I pointed out the medians on many of those interstates was not wide enough for two lanes plus three barriers (one between the truck-only lanes, one between the trucks and cars on each side), and having only one lane for trucks in each direction (and no way to get out due to the barrier) meant a disabled truck stops everything.

Then I asked how the trucks would get OUT of these "truck only" lanes and onto the usual roads, what happens if there's no median at all (as in, a barrier already there due to widening), etc, and he first got defensive, then huffy, before just not responding to me any further.

Also, in the field of classical studies--some of you may be familiar with the Loeb editions--small books (bound in red for Latin, and green for Greek) with side-by-side text showing the Latin or Greek original on the left page, with the English "translation" on the right-hand page. Do not trust any of the translations in the older editions of these books.

Ever.

Just don't.

These books were intended for use at the secondary-school level, and therefore all "impure" material was carefully adjusted in the translations so as to avoid bringing a blush to innocent cheeks and forcing teachers to make awkward explanations. Depending on the original text in question, much may be lost as a result. Most of Demosthenes' insults lose their verve, Ovid and Catullus become quite tame, and Aristophanes wouldn't know himself. Martial would probably deny authorship, and Juvenal would be looking into a lawsuit. Marcus Aurelius probably suffers less than these others, but none can be seen as reliable.

Recently, the editors have made an effort to replace old, dicey translations with more accurate ones, but it will take a while, and it's wisest to check the original publication date on all of these.

Also, any writer on classical studies who is named Victor Davis Hanson, or who references VDH with respect and high regard. See nationalist historians in my previous post if you're at a loss here, although why any in the fluourosphere would be, I'm not sure. I am tying to decide if I need to alter my opinion of Donald Kagan's work on Greek history, or if I should just dismiss his most recent writing as the result of brain toxixity from Koolaid consumption and let the older work stand on its own.

When I first got here I had little to read but my roommates' travel guidebooks to Japan. I've found that any book that tells you it will tell you "the real unbiased truth about Japan!" is sure to be a compendium of the author's prejudices--either Japan as a morally corrupt nation of racist, misogynist robots (and lots of mindless, sexually available women) or Japan as delightful cartoon wonderland of marvelous contrasts between the futuristic and the ancient (with lots of inscrutably polite, sexually available women.) Not that I like guidebooks anyway, but I immediately put one down if it promises "the real unbiased truth" about anywhere.

Um, what else? I think some of the things people mention here are things you shouldn't trust, but you should probably read, and Vasari falls under that category.

Seth Gordon@82: A committee with Orthodox, Reform, and Conservative Jews? I'm surprised they got past Genesis. Hell, I'm surprised they agreed on the shape of the conference table.

Any of the books of Carlos Castenada, at least if regarded as "non-fiction" books.

Kiewe, Heinz Edgar (1967). The Sacred History of Knitting, along with anyone who claims that figures in The Book of Kells are wearing Aran fisherman's-style sweaters.

I'd advise against putting too much stock in anything that Richard Dawkins writes about the subject of theology. Like Christopher Hitchens, he's a clever and seductive rhetorical cheater who might convince you that Everyone with any religious faith is a frothing fundamentalist

#87: Do not trust any of the translations in the older editions of these books.

How old is older?

JamesP @ #79, I didn't know that Iris Chang's Rape of Nanking was suspect; I have a copy and got about four chapters in before I put it down for unremembered reasons. I'm sure none of those reasons was that I had an argument with the facts as presented, though.

Interesting.

Index test for books on Washington State History:

Check for the words Vitus Bering, Hudson Bay Company, Black Priests, and Longmeyer Party. If they are missing, reject the source, as you are guaranteed to have in your hands a history of the Lewis and Clark Expedition and the development of the City of Seattle, with, perhaps, an addendum explaining (badly, and with frequent reference to "Roll on Columbia" as a primary source) the Columbia Basin project.

Would that the Washington State Superintendent of Public Instruction would use that test (although it would leave precisely no texts for the Washington State History class required for high school graduation).

I was just surprised to discover that The Bell Curve -- a book unquestionably academic in origin and presentation, as well as ludicrously flawed on so many levels -- is not only still kept in print (thanks, CBS!), but ranks distressingly high in some sales subcategories at Amazon.

Seth Gordon at 82: thanks.

Any New Testament scholars around?

CE Petit at #18 -- I disagree vehemently. It depends, of course, on what you mean by constitutional history, but there are an awful lot of very good medieval (and ancient, too) legal historians and a ton of work on legal trials -- and how would a degree in law help with that?

Let's see ... Tuchman doesn't really count as scholarly, but just in case, A Distant Mirror at the very least. I distrust anything by Cantor. Anything that discusses 'feudalism', 'the feudal system', or 'feudal society' without the counterbalance of Reynolds, especially. Philippe Aries' book on Early Modern Childhood (I can't find the title, but it's the translation of L'enfant et la vie familiale sous l'Ancien Régime.) Argh.

CE Petit, at 18: I recently finished reading a constitutional history of England published in the 1930s, which was adapted from a series of lectures given by an English barrister in the 1880s; I would argue that items in that class are exceptions to your rule. :)

Oh -- I also dispute the non-utility of the Loeb translations. They aren't as good as most Penguin translations (although most of the Thorpe translations of things Frankish aren't all that good), but if one uses them as one should -- reading the original language and using the translation to help with vocab or odd grammatical construction, they're fine. Anybody doing research needing Greek or Latin sources has an obligation to read the original language themselves, anyway -- or at least check the translation carefully when citing!

Just about any supposedly scholarly book entitled [Subject X] in Shakespeare's England should be approached with extreme caution. Completely meaningless periodisation.

GM Trevelyan, English Social History.

Gavin Menzies, 1421: The Year China Discovered the World (or so I'm told by historians who should know)

Richard@54: There's plenty of bad urban planning literature going around, but I'm not sure I'd throw Jane Jacobs under the bus with the rest of it. (Then again, she wasn't really part of the establishment, when she wrote The Death and Life of Great American Cities or after).

Fidelio @ 64

Yes and no. Many of us do our own research using primary sources, but we use previous research as a guide. Janet Arnold is a wonderful resource for pointing at portraits and exemplars. Robin Netherton has some of the best articles on reconstructing the 14th c. fitted gown out there. Melanie Schuessler is doing facinating research on Tudor clothing and culture. I would be silly if I didn't use the resources availble to me. There is no need for me to rehash the French hood as a piece of headgear until and unless I find something that brings Melanie's research into question for me. I can use her research as a springboard, and am. The Tudor Tailor is very well done and is on the shelves of most researchers I know. It also has caught on as a pop book about Tudor clothing that is widely distributed and widely seen as extremely credible and citeable.

The type of attitude that says one should always only use primary sources leads to duplication of effort and frustration. Enough good scholarship has been done in the last 20 years on textiles to make the use of secondary sources acceptable, and probably partially because of the re-enactment community, some of it has become widely availble and distributed.

TChem @ 91

They WHAT??????????? I think I'm glad I missed that one.

Will and Ariel Durant's "Story of Civilization" - for college-level and above history classes, and don't even think of a professional cite. High school might be acceptable. Junior high and below runs the risk of one being thought too advanced.

JESR @ #95: Don't forget the all important Pig War and the role it played in Washington history.

I keep thinking of living scientists when I think of bad sources. It seems tacky to mention them by name.

Richard Anderson #54, suggesting Christopher Alexander isn't such a great idea, at least in city planning

Alexander does have some utility elsewhere, as providing a vocabulary for architects and architectural historians to use. I've read an excellent dissertation, supervised by my art history graduate methods professor, analyzing the houses and apartment blocks of Ostia, Pompeii and Herculaneum in terms of pattern language.

He's also reasonably good on a more nebulous thing: phenomenology of individual pattern elements. I used him for that in my own dissertation.

I suspect that where things get out of hand is when Alexander is used as a code generator and not a parser, as it were.

#93--See Harvard University Press's history of the Loeb editions, especially the last section. (Among other this, they give some, uh, clear and speaking examples of the dendency to clean up translations in earlier editions.) Staarting in 1989, they began re-doing some of the older translations, and plan to work their way though all of them, eventually. So I'd check the date of the original edition, using 1989 as my cut=off date.

#100. I'd say that anyone with a good knowledge of Greek and Latin can spot the weaknesses in the older Loeb translations on their own. However, there are a lot of people out there who have little or no knowledge of these languages, and won't realize where the flaws lie. Since the Loeb editions are often the only easily available translations for a lot of obscure writers that may be of interest to people outside the specific field of classical studies*, I feel like it's worth giving the warning.

*Fields like history of military tactics, medical history, history of botany, and so on. People working in the field of renaissance literature ought to have a good knowledge of classical literature, but don't always have much Latin, and rarely, much Greek--at least, I've run into several.

Coming late to the thread.

abi@4:
Suetonius, uncorroborated, on historical infotainment.

Well, the same applies to most ancient sources, frankly. But the real killer here is the Historia Augusta - and better still, the extra lives in the new Penguin edition (Lives of Later Roman Emperors) which are explicitly invented by the modern editors on the model of an ancient biography. Whose idea was that? Anyway, the HA isn't evidence for anything except itself, for all that a late fourth-century hoax continuation of Suetonius supposedly written a century earlier by six authors who constantly abuse / vouch for each other has a certain literary interest.

Loeb translations: it's true that the older ones (1910s or so) tend to bowdlerise or else leave untranslated the prurient details; those editions which translate into verse also rarely convince as either translations or verse. But they are fine if you have the Latin or Greek to check them against the original; and even if you don't, they do frequently annotate and explain their decisions. They have their flaws, but they're far from credibility-killers.

#73: Biblical Archaeology Review

I found that there is some serious and scholarly stuff in that: I have in mind an excellent article about the church of S. Sepolcro in Bologna, but I think in general it's a lot more reliable than it sounds. I may have missed some of the bad stuff, though.

Lizzy L., #97: I am not any kind of biblical scholar (Talmudic, Tanakhic, or New Testament), so I quake and tremble at what the New Testament scholars who are on Making Light will say of my suggestions. But to share my experience: I took a few academically rigorous Bible classes in college and grad school, and the text we used was the New Oxford Annotated Bible. Lots of footnotes indicating the literal translation of a word in the original language, possible alternate tranlations, etc. It also includes the Apocrypha (which are Catholic texts, I believe).

For religious as opposed to scholarly needs, a pastor whose erudition I trust implicitly, suggested the NRSV (New Revised Standard, or Not Really Satisfactory, Version). Not poetic, but supposedly an accurate translation.

#16" Every comp sci author (too numerous to mention) who cites Christopher Alexander's work on design patterns

I have heard, but call this unsubstantiated rumor only, that real architects do not think kindly about Alexander's work. Professional input is welcome here.

More comp sci: most of the "extreme programming" methodology, though some of the work on unit testing is valuable.

#74: This goes double for Harvey Mansfield's work on Machiavelli.

Absolute crap. Mansfield tries to invest the book's abrupt ending - one which all historical scholars believe is because it was left unfinished - with kabbalistic significance.

#79: Much as I love them, you probably couldn't get away with citing Norwich's Byzantium trilogy in any serious conversation

No original research. Relies on secondary sources: in particular, his account of the Crusades is lifted from Runciman.

Oh, one more: Jack Chambers' biography of Miles Davis, Milestones. A five hundred page work for which the author didn't bother to interview even one living primary source. I suspect he didn't listen to half of the recordings cited, too.

Sisuile 103: I haven't seen it in anything scholarly (and I'm not a textile scholar, anyhow, just nosy), though the Kiewe sometimes gets taken as such. But I've seen it in knitting books that should know better, and the Internet considers it common
knowledge.

When I was reading everything I could find about dreams, lucid dreams, and astral projection, I came across Patricia Garfield's book Creative Dreaming. As a practical guide to working with one's dreams, I found it useful and inspirational. However. I got very interested in her chapter about the "dream culture of the Senoi," so I went from there to looking up everything I possibly could about the Senoi of Malaysia. And discovered that Ms. Garfield was, along with one Kilton Stewart, perpetrating some really unsound scholarship, which might in fact be called "lies" and "made-up shit." (Domhoff's "Senoi Dream Theory" goes into this in great detail.)

And speaking of Margaret Murry and Starhawk, I had to stop including Magickal Blend magazine among my materials for a show on spirituality that's part of our state's audio programming for the blind. It was full of articles with wide-eyed worshipfulness for that Primordial Cult Of The Great Mother, not to mention wide-eyed rage over the 9 million witches killed during the Burning Times. As I haven't read it in some years now, I can't swear that its nature hasn't changed. Maybe it's holding its contributors to higher standards of scholarship now?

Oops, fidelio posted while I was still writing. I still think you can mostly trust the Loeb editions, but I suppose it's fair to warn people to be on their guard.

Lizzy: my understanding is that the NEB was an attempt to get close to the original Hebrew/Greek, and may have succeeded in that (although I seem to remember there are still some famous howlers). But it has a tin ear for prose style, at about the level of Dan Brown. If I want to quote, even in academic writing, I usually use the New Revised Standard Version or, actually, the King James. Mind you, I'm usually dealing with people whose Bible was the Vulgate or the Vetus Latina, or the Septuagint, and when I need to be exact I give those in the original, so I guess the point stands.

Any work of literary criticism that contains the phrase "the subtext is..."