UNICEF Gives us lots of Great Data….and maybe a bit too much Expert Judgement

All readers of this blog should know this UNICEF web site.  Childmortality.org lets you quickly call up a mass of child mortality data for most countries in the world. Sometimes you learn that the state of our knowledge is a mess (for example, check out Angola) but UNICEF always tries to impose some order by …

Ewen MacAskill Happy Ending: Guardian Correction

Thank you. We've amended the online version of the article now, and we'll publish a correction in the paper.   Best wishes Barbara Harper   Note: Refer back to this blog post if you're confused.  MS

Civilians versus Combatant Watch: Ewen MacAskill edition

Here is a decent article by Ewen MacAskill reporting on a plan by Jeremy Corbyn to apologize to the Iraqi and British people over the Iraq war if he becomes Labour leader next month. Great. Unfortunately, the article also provides a perfect example of the shoddy practice, discussed just a few weeks ago on the blog, …

Citation Distortion: Part I

Apologies for the radio silence.  I went on holiday (for just one week) and then, somehow, have been desperately playing catch up ever since. This 2009 paper by Steven Greenberg entitled "How citation distortions create unfounded authority...." strikes me as remarkably useful and important. Suppose I write a peer-reviewed journal article  that includes a claim that …