WALS data in Science and Nature

[Michael Dunn]

With regard to references to WALS in Dunn et al 2011 Nature:

WALS is properly cited in the main text. The full references to the
eight individual WALS chapters we used appear in the supplementary
materials, which in the Science/Nature format is an integral part of the
paper, and arguably the appropriate place for them, since that is where
we discuss the individual features in detail.

Nevertheless, for reasons of prominence it would have been better to
have had these individual citations in the main text, but this is
impossible in Nature, Science or PNAS formats, which all put strict
limits on references. These constraints should be borne in mind in
designing citation styles for online materials such as WALS - the
citation should be as compact as possible.

In our case, our original submitted version did have the eight
individual chapter references, but reviewers insisted on more reference
to methods, so squeezing them out.

Incidentally, we cite Matthew Dryer prominently in the text, and his
central role has clearly been recognised e.g. in the popular science
press, where he has been interviewed and quoted in a number of articles.

Michael Dunn

On Fri, Apr 15, 2011 at 08:35:19AM +0200, Martin Haspelmath wrote:
> It's really nice to see data from the World Atlas of Language
> Structures being used by quantitative historical linguists again in
> a prominent place:
> 
> Atkinson, Quentin D. 2011. Phonemic Diversity Supports a Serial
> Founder Effect Model of Language Expansion from Africa. /Science/
> 332(6027). (15 April, 2011).
> (http://www.sciencemag.org/content/332/6027/346)
> 
> However, neither the Dunn et al. article published in Nature
> yesterday nor the Atkinson article published in Science today cite
> the authors from whose work they took their data in the articles
> themselves. They just say:
> 
> -- "Information on word order typology was derived partly from the
> World Atlas of Language Structure[s] database" (Dunn et al.)
> -- "using data on vowel, consonant, and tone inventories taken from
> 504 languages in the World Atlas of Language Structures" (Atkinson)
> 
> This goes against the WALS editors' explicit request on the first
> page of WALS Online (http://wals.info/):
> 
> "It is important to cite the specific chapter that you are taking
> your information from, not just the general work "WALS Online"
> (Haspelmath et al. 2008), unless you are citing data from more than
> 25 chapters simultaneously."
> 
> It is true that both articles list Matthew Dryer's and Ian
> Maddieson's WALS chapters in the supporting/supplementary materials,
> but this is not enough. Dryer and Maddieson spent decades assembling
> this information, so their names need to be mentioned prominently.
> (I should say that this problem has arisen quite a few times with
> other articles, also articles published much less prominently in
> linguistics journals. I am just using this opportunity to remind
> everyone of the way the WALS editors would like to see WALS data
> cited.)
> 
> I fear that if our colleagues don't respect the citation etiquette,
> then in the future people may be less willing to make the results of
> their efforts over many years freely available to everyone.
> 
> As typologists, we should see these prominent articles as an
> incentive to supply even more cross-linguistic information in a way
> that can be interpreted with sophisticated quantitative methods.
> 
> Greetings,
> Martin Haspelmath
> 
> 

-- 
Michael Dunn, Max Planck Research Group Leader:
 Evolutionary Processes in Language and Culture
Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics
PB310, 6500AH Nijmegen, The Netherlands
 http://www.mpi.nl/people/dunn-michael | office: +31 (0)24 3521181
 http://www.mpi.nl/research/research-projects/evolutionary-processes
 http://www.mpi.nl/eoss | Evolution of Semantic Systems consortium