The size of a bibliography alone is not a great measure of quality, I was curious so I decided to investigate a single quote I stumbled on when reading through and strike me as an example of something likely to be taken out of context. It is the only quotation I have investigated, I am not cherry picking here:
Why have epidemic patterns in Great Britain not altered in four centuries, centuries that have seen great increases in the speed of human transport?
John J. Cannell, M.D. (2008), “On the Epidemiology of Influenza,” in Virology Journal
Which you will find on page 88, and is presented as a direct quote. Curiously, whilst the quotations above and the sections below get numbered citations in the end matter, this one doesn't. No matter, it is
easy to find. The first thing I note is the wrong attribution, the article he's citing has five authors, it should be attributed to Cannell
et al. The second thing I notice is that the above quote is actually cited in the article, it's not a novel question: why not cite the primary source then? This is poor citation practice. But the choice of Cannell is also interesting because he's known for two things: 1. a controversial anti-smoking stance where he turned patients away from his clinic, and 2. a poorly supported hypothesis that vitamin D deficiency is linked to influenza infection (he also published, away from peer review, that he thinks vitamin D deficiency causes autism; it seems to be his thing). The third thing is that the paper he is citing is an attempt to
answer the question posed. Presenting the quote as if Cannell
et al think it is an unanswered question is misleading; in fact, they think they have the answer and give it in the paper cited. What's more the whole paper is essentially an answer to
an earlier paper by Hope-Simpson and Golubev which itself offers a (different) answer to the question in the quote. It's also worth noting that both the Cannell
et al paper and the second paper both contain references to abundant evidence demonstrating that Influenza is being spread by the Influenza virus (Influenza A in this case) and so abundant evidence against the notion of the book.
So, in a single arbitrarily chosen quote, we find: 1. Incorrect attribution; 2. Incorrect choice of source; 3. Misleading use of a quotation; and 4. Ignoring of other information in the cited source. With this in mind, do you still think that thick bibliography counts for much?
