Comment by Feirefiz on Scholarship: How to Do It Efficiently · 2014-10-08T19:42:47.174Z · LW · GW

While I'm all for spending time and effort on research, I'd like to add to the above post that finding sources that fit one's research topic doesn't add up to good scholarship. It's close reading and critical thinking that do the deal when it comes to evaluating sources. The contribution above lauds the article "The nature of procrastination" (2007) by Piers Steel as a time-saving, thorough review article on the issue of procrastination. That article, however, even though it apparently was written by a published author of a self-help book on procrastination, is a pretty good example for bad, if not spurious, scholarship (and writing).

Look at these examples:

• "Continued research into procrastination should not be delayed" -- From the abstract -- is this a joke?
• "Ferrari, Johnson, and McCown's (1995) book on the topic is extensive but focused primarily on measurement and theory, with less emphasis on empirical findings." -- Are measurements not empirical findings too? (p. 65).
• Under the heading "History of Procrastination" the author mentions several hoax reviews or books on procrastination, including some that were never finished (p. 66). -- Why even include this information in a supposedly scientific article on procrastination?
• The entire historical section aims to establish the extremely vague claim that procrastination "has long been a prevalent problem" without establishing the meaning or even actual prevalence of procrastination in its historical context. A vague, sweeping historical claim is made on the basis of random text snippets.
• Steel discusses sources such as Roberts, Chernyshenko, Stark, and Goldberg (2005) to make claims about procrastination (p. 67) even though Roberts et al. does not even mention procrastination. The author's arguments are frequently extremely badly reasoned and not presented in a way that allows readers to actually evaluate the arguments presented.
• All the effort spent on reviewing a large number of sources amounts to an insight that any freshwo_man could have formulated and that, in its generality and vagueness, is nearly meaningless: that procrastination has always been with us, is a major problem now and will most likely increase -- due to the temptations of modern life such as the internet.

I've picked only a few examples, can't see that the article presents any kind of useful review of the literature on procrastination.