Citations Redux

[marcusmarcusrc]

A year ago I made a post about a well-reproduced statistic on number of dirtiest cities in China and how it was wrong. Well, tonight my dinner reading was from this month's Foreign Affairs, a fairly respectable journal, and lo and behold, in the middle of the article about "China's Coming Environmental Crash" by Elizabeth Economy (great last name), there was the 16 of the world's 20 dirtiest cities statistic again. No citation at all, because this is, of course, common wisdom. I think I may write a letter to the editor. Or Elizabeth Economy. Or both...

Comments

[chenoameg.livejournal.com]

Heh. I have that song stuck in my head. It seems terribly appropriate for your current quest.

[kirisutogomen.livejournal.com]

Last time this came up, I never mentioned my own example. The well-reproduced statistic in this case is a comparison of engineering graduation numbers for the US, India, and China. What is cited is that the US graduates 70,000 engineers per year, while India produces 350,000 and China 600,000 per year. These numbers have been cited by Ted Kennedy, Newt Gingrich, and Bill Gates, as well as by the National Academies.

It turns out that none of those numbers are even close to reality. Nobody knows where they came from, but they've been cited so many times that you'll probably keep seeing them for the rest of the century.