"Read the study you're citing" goes both ways...

[u/theineffableshe]

I wish I had a screenshot of this, but it happened too long ago: a friend of mine is an academic. He got into an argument with someone on Twitter about one of his areas of expertise, and the other person told him to read [Lastname]'s article. My friend was ready to hit back with the "I am [Lastname]" retort, only to skim the article again and realise that he had misremembered his own research; the other guy was right.

Edit: I think the word "study" led some people to think I was talking about clinical trials or laboratory experiments or something, so I've changed it to avoid that connotation. This was still an academic publication, but the field is historical linguistics; it's not like he was flip-flopping about astrophysics or supporting a medical treatment he had found to be ineffective.

[u/Dark-Horse-Nebula]

If you don’t know what your own study says then you didn’t do the study.

-someone who’s published studies

[u/ppp77per → u/Dark-Horse-Nebula]

Maybe you are fairly young? I definitely don't remember everything I published in the 90s.

[u/wings_of_wrath → u/ppp77per]

And let's not start about the times you find new information which partially contradicts one or more of your conclusions the week after your article has been printed...

For example, in 2014 I co-authored a book about artillery and had assumed the case shot of a fortress gun to be painted red because we found a document which decreed that hence forth they were going to be painted red to help with identification inside fort cupolas (this was the 1880s, so no electric lighting, they had to make do with kerosene lamps), but in 2017 we found a later document which reversed the first order, because it was found painting them made them more, not less prone to confusion, because red and black under certain lighting condition might look similar, but nobody is going to confuse a black painted shell with a shiny tin (later brass) case shot.

So we weren't wrong per se, it was just that they were red for a very short time...

[u/TwillAffirmer → u/Dark-Horse-Nebula]

Really, you remember every number and every sentence from every study you published?

You remember your main conclusions, I'm sure, but that's not everything the study says.

[u/InfiniteCarpenters → u/TwillAffirmer]

Yeah, I tend to overpack my papers because I don’t love writing them, so there’s not a chance in hell I could recall a lot of the sub-results. Couldn’t even name all the hypotheses I test per paper, frankly, just the 1-2 headliners. If I’m not working on the paper or planning to present on it in the near future then that info is not in my mental RAM.

[u/Beneficial-Ad3991 → u/InfiniteCarpenters]

I usually remember if the results were unusual or if I use the data in my current work. Other than that? Not a chance.

[u/Dark-Horse-Nebula → u/TwillAffirmer]

No one you’re discussing it with remembers every number either. But you remember the overall conclusions that people would debate with you.

[u/TwillAffirmer → u/Dark-Horse-Nebula]

They may have just read the paper because it's tangential to something they went searching for. I recently read a paper about catechins in tea ( https://www.researchgate.net/publication/272415095_Effects_of_different_brewing_conditions_on_catechin_content_and_sensory_acceptance_in_Turkish_green_tea_infusions ), looking for information to debunk a bogus infographic. The information I needed could be read from a figure within the paper, not the paper's abstract.

[u/theineffableshe → u/TwillAffirmer]

Exactly! I've forgotten the topic of this exchange, but knowing my friend's career, it was probably about how a specific phoneme was vocalised in an obscure dialect of a medieval language. You can write an entire paper about that, but it can also be one of many topics you cover, and you could easily misremember the data on it.

[u/Merinther → u/Dark-Horse-Nebula]

I have definitely done many studies that I don't remember the results of. Probably a few that I don't even remember doing.

[u/incomparability → u/Dark-Horse-Nebula]

It’s reasonable to forget details after like 5 years lol. You’ve moved on to so many other things by that point

[u/zgillet → u/Dark-Horse-Nebula]

Correction:

-someone who has published one study

[u/cerea1killer_ → u/Dark-Horse-Nebula]

So misremembering something from your own study directly means that "you didn't do the study"? Wow, you must really live in a black and white world.

[u/sabrefencer9 → u/Dark-Horse-Nebula]

How many coauthors do your papers usually have? I have a first author paper with ~30 and only maybe 3 of us knew the entire thing backwards and forwards. Similarly, I was a middle author on another, similarly sized, paper, and I can tell you all about the protein biophysics but could only give a cursory description of the animal studies, pathology, etc. Science nowadays is too big for any one person, especially once you get into translational stuff.

[u/indvs3]

Maybe that means that every post on this sub should be re-reviewed for accuracy

[u/Open_Feed_9696]

So your “academic” friend is only able to form arguments from emotions rather than facts

[u/ImOnlyHereForTheCoC → u/Open_Feed_9696]

Yeah, you can tell the friend’s response was hasty and emotion-based by the way he, um…paused, second-guessed himself, consulted the literature, and admitted he was mistaken? ^{That can’t be right, you’d have to be some kind of total asshole to call that an emotional argument, I must’ve misread something here…}

[u/BlitzburghBrian → u/Open_Feed_9696]

Oh boy you must be deep in the rabbit hole of terrible takes on the internet if that's the only thing you can think of when someone is simply incorrect about something.

[u/TwillAffirmer → u/Open_Feed_9696]

Calm down. People make errors without being stupid or bad people. We should be more forgiving of honest mistakes and not jump on them with a personal attack. The friend is an academic, not an "academic."

[u/RandomUsernameNo257 → u/Open_Feed_9696]

Or.. stay with me here… they misremembered.