literature reviewing
Give yourself the tools to succeed!
Give yourself time to think.
A good literature review cannot be done in
6 weeks or 6 easy steps.
Chris Hart
The Sokal Affiar
This is the title of a paper written by Alan Sokal and his credentials.
Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity
Department of Physics New York University 4 Washington Place New York, NY 10003 USA Internet: SOKAL@NYU.EDU Telephone: (212) 998-7729 Fax: (212) 995-4016 November 28, 1994 revised May 13, 1995 Note: This article was published in Social Text #46/47, pp. 217-252 (spring/summer 1996). Biographical Information: The author is a Professor of Physics at New York University. He has lectured widely in Europe and Latin America, including at the Università di Roma ``La Sapienza'' and, during the Sandinista government, at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de Nicaragua. He is co-author with Roberto Fernández and Jürg Fröhlich of Random Walks, Critical Phenomena, and Triviality in Quantum Field Theory (Springer, 1992).
What we can take from Sokal:
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Using scientific or pseudo-scientific terminology without bothering much about what these words mean.
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Importing concepts from the natural sciences into the humanities without the slightest justification, and without providing any rationale for their use.
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Displaying superficial erudition by shamelessly throwing around technical terms where they are irrelevant, presumably to impress and intimidate the non-specialist reader.
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Manipulating words and phrases that are, in fact, meaningless.
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Self-assurance on topics far beyond the competence of the author and exploiting the prestige of science to give discourses a veneer of rigor.
See chp 8 for examples of when researchers set themselves up as experts.
Read the full paper here,
http://www.physics.nyu.edu/faculty/sokal/transgress_v2/transgress_v2_singlefile.html
It was published in, Social Text, 46/47:217-252 (spring/summer, 1996).
Sokal admitted that the article was
“chock-full of nonsensical, but unfortunately authentic, quotes about physics and mathematics by prominent French and American intellectuals”
“my article is a mélange of truths, half-truths, quarter-truths, falsehoods, non sequiturs, and syntactically correct sentences that have no meaning whatsoever.”
(Times Literary Supplement, 17th October, 1997: 17).
Alan Sokal admited what he had done. Others are not so honest. Check this site out called Retractionwatch and be prepared for a suprise.