Citing Sources Properly

[marcusmarcusrc]

I am slowly growing to loathe people who do not properly cite their sources. Well, not really loathe. I do not really loathe anyone, not even certain political figures. But I decided that for a paragraph of the chapter I'm working on that it would be good to state where the pollution in the city I was discussing fell in terms of other cities throughout the world. I thought that the "Most polluted cities in the world" list would be easy to find. Well, I found 20 sources stating that China had 16 of the top 20 most polluted cities in the world, including the Economist, CNN, the BBC website, and even Congressional Testimony. They all cited a World Bank study, but gave no specifics. Well, after significant searching, I found two databases at the World Bank:

Database 1 was a group of 106 "selected cities", of which 13 out of 20 of the most polluted were in China (note: 13, not 16, but close enough. And the top 4 matched, too). Database 1 cites Database 2 as the source of its data.

Database 2 is a much more complete list, with some 3000 cities. No matter what population cutoff I used, China had nowhere near the majority of the top 20. At a cutoff of 1 million, which seemed a reasonable number, China had 3 out of the top 20.

Of course, Database 1 and Database 2 don't actually exactly agree: for one thing, Database 1 seems to use metropolitan area population where Database 2 uses city population. And the PM concentration in Database 1 for a given city was close to, but not exactly, equal to Database 2. And Database 2 has an attached paper which is "forthcoming in 2006" but not yet available.

So frustration all around. But really, I'm sort of miffed at the Economist and BBC for not looking up their original source properly. (In fact, all but the BBC used the exact same wording, leading me to believe that one person made up a quotation based on this subsample database, and then everyone else copied him)

(For the curious: the most polluted cities in Database 1 are Delhi, Cairo, Calcutta, and Tianjin. In Databsae 2, several cities are more polluted than Delhi, including Baghdad - pre-Iraq war - and Karachi)


The moral of the story: whenever you write something, please give a proper citation to the data source you use, and you will make graduate students the world over happier people!

Comments

[kirisutogomen.livejournal.com]

You would be absolutely right to wonder. You might think that a magazine called The Economist would have accurate reporting on economics. Well, it's better than the reporting in a lot of other major news outlets, but it's still woefully poor.