Criticism Swirls Around High-Profile History Book about North Korea
ResourcesCriticism Swirls Around High-Profile History Book about North Korea
What is this about?
This case concerns the 2013 book publication of ‘’the Tyranny of the Weak’, published by a professor on the history of North Korea. In the book the author presents his historical research on how North Korea ‘survived’ the Cold War.
In 2014 another historian noticed several irregularities in the sources of the work of the professor and started investigating these irregularities. Many of these sources referred to archives, and were written in Russian, German, Chinese or Korean. The other historian decided to visit one of the archives in person to check the original sources. He states “[I checked] the collection there to reconstruct the original archival locations (…). This way it could be fully verified that the vast majority of the Russian archival citations from 1957-60 were invalid, because the cited files could not be found either in the Seoul collection or in the (essentially identical) Wilson Center collection.”
Upon this discovery, he also reached out to an archive in Berlin, where most sources could also not be located, or contained different information as suggested in the book. In addition, as the historian points out on Retractionwatch, several uncanny similarities appear to exist between "Tyranny of the Weak" and his own book on a similar topic.
The pofessor and book author, replied stating that “[t]he book was reviewed by two expert external reviewers before publication. In addition, before the book was published three years ago I shared the entire manuscript with one of the scholars who is currently critical of the book and is a renowned expert on the Russian sources on North Korea. At that time, this scholar did not find any problem with my use of sources, although he made a number of other comments which I incorporated in the final version of the book.” In 2015 the book earned 52 corrections in the new publication.Why is this important?
Accuracy in referencing is important for several reasons[1] such as avoiding improper appropriation of others ideas, allowing readers to further research certain topics which might be only briefly touched upon in the text, embedding the text in the relevant literature on the same topic and supporting ones claims on scientific evidence which has been peer reviewed by other researchers. Reflecting on this case, for instance in a classroom setting, can support the understanding good referencing practices and help in avoiding mistakes[2].
- ↑ Santini A. (2018). The Importance of Referencing. Journal of critical care medicine (Universitatea de Medicina si Farmacie din Targu-Mures), 4(1), 3–4. https://doi.org/10.1515/jccm-2018-0002
- ↑ Penders B. (2018) Ten simple rules for responsible referencing. PLOS Computational Biology 14(4): e1006036. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1006036
