Imagine the following situation: you have come across numerous references to a paper purporting to show that the chances of successfully treating a disease contracted at age 10 are substantially lower if the disease is detected later: somewhat lower at age 20 to very poor at age 50. Every author draws more or less the same bar chart to depict this situation: the picture below, showing rising mortality from left to right.

Rising mortality, left to right

You search for the original paper, which proves a long quest: the conference publisher have lost some of their archives in several moves, several people citing the paper turn out to no longer have a copy, etc. You finally locate a copy of the paper (let's call it G99) thanks to a helpful friend with great scholarly connections.

And you find out some interesting things.

The most striking is what the author's original chart depicts: the chances of successfully treating the disease detected at age 50 become substantially lower as a function of age when it was contracted; mortality is highest if the disease was contracted at age 10 and lowest if contracted at age 40. The chart showing this is the picture below, showing decreasing mortality from top to bottom, for the same ages on the vertical axis.

Decreasing mortality, top to bottom

Not only is the representation topsy-turvy; the two diagrams can't be about the same thing, since what is constant in the first (age disease detected) is variable in the other, and what is variable in the first (age disease contracted) is constant in the other.

Now, as you research the issue a little more, you find out that authors prior to G99 have often used the first diagram to report their findings; reportedly, several different studies on different populations (dating back to the eighties) have yielded similar results.

But when citing G99, nobody reproduces the actual diagram in G99, they all reproduce the older diagram (or some variant of it).

You are tempted to conclude that the authors citing G99 are citing "from memory"; they are aware of the earlier research, they have a vague recollection that G99 contains results that are not totally at odds with the earlier research. Same difference, they reason, G99 is one more confirmation of the earlier research, which is adequately summarized by the standard diagram.

And then you come across a paper by the same author, but from 10 years earlier. Let's call it G89. There is a strong presumption that the stud...

Sculptingman

Sculptingman

Sculptingman

Sculptingman