So, I'm editing a paper and one of the references is a paper that was given at "THE OXFORD INSTITUTE"
Is this a new iteration of the famed/notoriously prestigious ORT, or is it a legit group?
Their website se-e-e-e-ms legit,
https://www.oxfordsummerprogram.com/
but just wanted to check to be sure...and nothing on the web gives enough to be sure of disambiguation.
Also, this was amusing:
http://flakyc.blogspot.com/2017/01/oxford-round-table.html
M.
It doesn't look like it's the ORT, but it's clearly a summer school affiliated with Oxford University. It says it's non-profit, but that doesn't automatically make it a source of credible scholarly papers. (And they're so eager to assert that they're accredited that it makes me wonder why they're implying this is some sort of guarantee of high standards.) It's sort of like citing a paper given at "University of Alabama Summer School in Tuscaloosa." Really kind of a "personal communication" level of credential.
It's an interesting balance to strike: you obviously have to cite other work and can't just ignore it because it's not published. At the same time, it's less persuasive evidence than something that's been peer-reviewed. Depends on what the purpose of the reference is, I suppose?
It's a not-too-bad paper that anchors a not-too-bad article (but both are a bit loosey-goosey in terms of basic grammar, although the reported facts seem to be in order and their use is not so imitative as to make me upset about plagarism). This is for an in-house published house organ, and I think I'm probably the only one caring at the moment, because in fact the thing could be kind of good. (topic for a vent, really...)
It's also unclear whether it's a published paper or just one given at an Institute seminar or something: I was trying to figure out how to set up the citation but the article author didn't give a full citation, just the title and author (I'm doing pre-pub vetting/editing, so for stuff like that we'll take it with a clean-up).
I'll just send it back and ask them to find out from the author directly, I think. Or if it's unpublished, it's on a website so they can site the URL; they can't leave it out because chunks of their argument do depend on this particular paper, which seems OK-enough for what it is.
One of six to do tonight. Oh, joy...
M.