[Corpora-List] Is it not noble to refer to your own opus?

[Jim Fidelholtz]

Hi, Yuri,

Editors (and I am one, as you know) do not tell authors not to refer to
themselves. This is only the case in the text of an article when it is being
submitted for arbitration for the journal, in order not to sway reviewers by
the 'august fame' of the author (ie favorably) or conversely, 'I never heard
of him, so he can't be any good' (ie, negatively). Likewise, authors, as a
matter of style as well, should avoid locutions like 'I showed (Fidelholtz
1975) that ...'. In other words, we aspire to blind reviewing, since that is
likely to be more objective. Of course, this is difficult in practice, since
the nature of the study will often indicate to others in the field who the
author is. And in corpus linguistics, we can just run different software on
the article and find out who wrote it  ;-).  Ha! It should be so easy!

In short, since blind reviewing has been instituted for most journals, many
surprises have resulted on both sides of the possible outcomes. For authors,
if there is any doubt about particular ways of expressing one's results, the
best idea is to contact the editor  before submitting or upon submission of
the article for suggestions on how to handle specific reference problems.

I do, however, doubt that we can find cases where really *no one* has ever
done *anything* that is pertinent to our topic. I did my thesis on the
phonology of an understudied American Indian language in the 1960s and still
managed a 5-page bibliography (none of which were me, though many were works
on general theoretical points).

Jim

On Mon, Sep 20, 2010 at 2:55 PM, Yuri Tambovtsev <yutamb at mail.ru> wrote:

>  Dear Corpora colleagues, selfreferences are prohibited. But what can I do
> if nobody writes anything in my narrow field of research? If I omit
> references to my own articles, then there'd be no references at all. What
> can you advise me? Is it not noble to refer to your own opus? Looking
> forward to hearing from you soon to yutamb at mail.ru  Bewell, Yuri
> Tambovtsev
>
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>


-- 
James L. Fidelholtz
Posgrado en Ciencias del Lenguaje
Instituto de Ciencias Sociales y Humanidades
Benemérita Universidad Autónoma de Puebla, MÉXICO
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