Talk:Ibn Zuhr

Anyone

Anyone know what the first word of this sentence is referencing?

"Chirugian, and did the first parenteral nutrition of Humans with a silver needle. He was born and died in Seville" Hiberniantears 21:29, 8 January 2007 (UTC)

Certainly--it's an old spelling of "surgeon": see http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/chirurgeon (English) and http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/chirurgia (Latin). Also, you don't know "Chirugian," but you do know "parenteral"? --Akhenaten0 (talk) 17:05, 7 May 2011 (UTC)

Stub and rework

For background information, please see RFC/U and Cleanup. With 51 edits, User:Jagged 85 is the main contributor to this article by far (2nd: 6 edits, all before Jagged began editing). The issues are a repeat of what had been exemplarily shown here, here, here, here or here. I restored the article to the last pre-Jagged version of 20 August 2007, but removed two first claims which are unreferenced. Categories, interwiki links, templates etc. are kept (while most external links were defunct), but Jagged's information in the infobox, as harmless as it might appear, should be restored only by someone knowledgeable in the subject. Gun Powder Ma (talk) 10:01, 1 May 2011 (UTC)

Name

For the curious, the page was started at Ibn Zuhr probably before it was justified but this cursory ngram seems to back up that it's overtaken Avenzoar, although note that Avenzoar still holds a 2:1 margin over both forms of Ibn(-)Zuhr at Google Scholar. All the same, lead with the shorter form. — LlywelynII 11:04, 22 August 2014 (UTC)

Sources for article expansion

Not an unbiased source, but the "{{9eb|Avenzoar}}" article in the EB 9th edition (1878) details his influences and legacy w/r/t Western Europe, which should be a section of the final article. — LlywelynII 11:19, 22 August 2014 (UTC)

Journal cite

Randykitty, what do you make of this edit? It's one of those journals I get spammed for. I looked at the article. It's short, but not bad, though it needed serious copy editing. The author seems to have some authority, though that's hard to judge. Should we remove citations from predatory or otherwise unreliable journals as a matter of principle? Thanks, Drmies (talk) 16:41, 5 January 2017 (UTC)

That journal is published by ARC Journals (ARC standing for "Academician's Research Center"), which is a predatory publisher on Beall's list. I think that as a rule, we should not consider this reliable sources, although conceivably we could occasionally make an exception if an article has been authored by a well-known academic. (Sometimes legitimate academics publish in one of these rags, unaware of their true nature - I saw an article like that a while ago from a good friend of mine). However, I would then treat it much like a blog post (we occasionally accept blogs as sources if the author is a recognized expert) rather than a peer-reviewed article (because the crappy or non-existent peer review is the main reason what makes these journals predatory). I guess what I'm saying is, we should regard this stuff as self-published, not peer-reviewed. Hope this helps. Happy New Year! --Randykitty (talk) 17:00, 5 January 2017 (UTC)

Thanks, and you too. So, in this case, I don't think anything is added to the article by including this source, given that an apparently solid source is cited already, and we can remove it because of redundancy? Like I said earlier, I wouldn't necessarily disqualify it because it seems poorly researched, though it is not so well-written. But the main point (and I just discussed this with a colleague) is, should we remove these kinds of citations to avoid the appearance of us endorsing the journal it was published in? And BTW I fully agree, as does my colleague, about a good-faith contribution: not everyone knows which journals are to be trusted, and we may appear to be punishing those scholars for excluding them even if we have good grounds for doing so. It's somewhat murky, morally and scholarly. Drmies (talk) 18:42, 5 January 2017 (UTC)

Murky it is indeed! I think that the most important part here is that these journals only perform a token peer review. A lot of these journals are used by (third rate) researchers to prop up their CV. I guess it boils down to what we do with blogs. If some random bloke blogs something, we don't accept that as a source. If some physicist blogs about politics, we don't include that either. But if a well-known and notable physicist blogs about his subject, then we often do accept it as a source. I think we should apply the same here, meaning that we should decide on a case by case basis. Having said this, I think that there are quite a few editors that would disagree with me and would argue for rigorous deletion of any reference to a predatory journal... (I don't know if you've seen the discussions at WP:NJournals or on the FRINGE noticeboard and some other scattered locations). --Randykitty (talk) 18:55, 5 January 2017 (UTC)

Thanks--I'll look into that. I'm surprised to find you taking a "soft" position, haha. I'm pondering this, and will ponder some more and ask for other input. Perhaps, but this depends on the community, this is good fodder for an RfC. When that time comes I'll let you know, because I can use your advice. (And I'm courtesy-pinging DGG, who I know is interested in these matters also.) Drmies (talk) 19:01, 5 January 2017 (UTC)

Reading the article itself, what the title calls quackery would be better described as folk medicine, a term the author uses. Even though that portion of his work contains a good deal of magical elements, he also wrote on medicine in the academic tradition, based on the medieval doctrine of the four humours, which by our standards today is only marginally more scienctific. It would therefore have been more appropriate to use a more neutral title, and if this had it published in a regular journal, I think the journal's editor would have changed the title. In most respects the author does seem qualified, but I think that to publish it in one ofthe ordinary journals of the history of medicine, she would have needed to write a considerably more extended article. This is therefore an example of the debasement of scientific standards incited or encourage by journals such as these. But, like RK, I cannot really see a reason not to include it. If included, the link needs to be given, even if it means making an exception to the blacklist -- it is https://www.arcjournals.org/pdfs/ijhsse/v2-i10/12.pdf. DGG ( talk ) 00:08, 6 January 2017 (UTC)