Academic urban legends: spinach as a source of iron

journals.sagepub.com

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> What I hope to achieve with this type of reference is that nobody will discover my laziness. I simply pretend that I have taken the effort to consult Hamblin (1981), without having done so. In short, I have plagiarized the Hamblin reference from Larsson. An attractive aspect of this academic shortcut is that it is usually impossible to discover and to prove the sin committed

This very lengthy article is less about spinach as it is about the integrity and effort behind citations and research. Great lessons that I fear will seem all but archaic to a generation raised to already cite ChatGPT as authoritative

ChatGPT says "spinach is rich in iron" by the way. Even more interestingly, it knows that "rich in iron" is bullshit, and explains when challenged (both the oxalates and the typo in research).

This actually mirrors a problem IRL - e.g. fairly recently some foundational research on Alzheimer's was discovered to be fake. Yet there are thousands of papers out there still being relied on and cited, that are partially or completely invalidated by this fraud. Worse, there are also ineffective drugs that are still prescribed. How to deal with this is not clear, given the limited research bandwidth, and poor reproducibility of medical research.

He never cites the claim that spinach really isn't high in iron :D

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