Britannica tears Nature a new one
It wasn’t long ago that many of us read about an article in the journal Nature that compared Wikipedia to the Encyclopedia Britannica. It found that, despite news reports of Wikipedia errors, the online encyclopedia was almost as accurate as Britannica.
Well, today comes a response from Britannica that essentially tears Nature’s piece to shreds, pointing out error after error in the method and the article. If Britannica is right, it casts a shadow on one of the formost science publications around.
Some quotes from the statement:
[A]lmost everything about the journal’s investigation, from the criteria for identifying inaccuracies to the discrepancy between the article text and its headline, was wrong and misleading. Dozens of inaccuracies attributed to the Britannica were not inaccuracies at all, and a number of the articles Nature examined were not even in the Encyclopedia Britannica. The study was so poorly carried out and its findings so error-laden that it was completely without merit.
* * *
Nature’s comments on the article “ethanol” were based on text not from the Encyclopedia Britannica but from Britannica Student Encyclopedia, a more basic work for younger readers. One of the reviewer’s comments referred to text that does not appear in any Britannica publication.
* * *
One Nature reviewer was sent only the 350-word introduction to Encyclopedia Britannica’s 6,000-word article on lipids. For Nature to have represented Britannica’s extensive coverage of the subject with this short squib was absurd, and it invalidated the findings of omissions alleged by the reviewer, since those matters were covered in sections of the article he or she never saw.
* * *
The “article” on “aldol reaction” that the journal sent its reviewer consisted of
passages taken selectively from two different Encyclopedia Britannica articles and joined together
with text evidently written by Nature’s editors. This was dishonest, and it completely misrepresented
Britannica’s published coverage of the subject.
And so on.
Read the enitre text of Britannica’s rather scathing comment (in PDF) http://corporate.britannica.com/britannica_nature_response.pdf.
