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I'm struggling to understand why this list exists. I can see the need for a general Bibliography of anthropology but, since that hasn't been created yet, why create this subset of "important" publications?
In any case, I'm extremely sceptical that it's possible to have consistent conclusion critera for a list like this. How on earth can one decide on an even slightly objective definition of "important"? The lead makes a stab of it, listing "influence", "breakthroughs" and "topic creator". But it's a rare academic publication that doesn't either open up new areas of research, present new scientific knowledge, or exert an influence on later scholarship, those things being the very reason they exist. So all the criteria hinge on this word "significantly", but there's no mention of how you demonstrate significance. Sources that state as much, I assume, that being the only thing conforming to WP:V. But there aren't any such sources in the article and again you'll seldom find a positive (or even a negative) review of a publication that doesn't concede the work has some merit and influence. The works in the list at the moment are extremely eclectic, especially in the non-sociocultural sections: there are introductory textbooks, seemingly randomly chosen edited volumes, and one work that hasn't even been published yet!
I notice that at least one similar list in the see also, List of important publications in biology has already been merged into Bibliography of biology on these grounds. I'm strongly inclined to suggest we do the same with this list, widening its scope to include any work whether it's 'important' or not, unless someone can drastically improve the sourcing and the clarity of the inclusion criteria. joe•roe t• c 17:40, 19 January 2013 (UTC)
This article could use some improvement, but I don't see any pressing need to move it (or put it through the AfD process). The list as it stands is useful -- it orients newcomers to anthropology by providing some landmarks, which is a natural extension of the "Further Reading" lists on Wikipedia and other reference works -- and the contents are not all obviously wrong or trivial. I wouldn't object to turning it into a Bibliography of anthropology, but I agree with Cnilep that it wouldn't resolve the problem, since we'd still need to establish inclusion criteria. That said, if the list does get turned into a bibliography, please note that WikiProject Bibliographies has done a lot of work on this issue; there are plenty of good ideas about inclusion criteria on that project page.
As for the specific concerns with this list, I think a publication would reasonably qualify if it is described as important, influential, a "major work," etc., in standard introductory anthropology texts, or is heavily cited in the anthropological literature. Maunus' suggestion of anthropology books awards isn't bad, either. It should be easy to satisfy these criteria for obvious candidates like Boas, Frazer, Malinowski, or Levi-Strauss, and I think it would be a reasonable way to decide whether anthropologists consider a book like Guns, Germs, and Steel to be important in their field. After some work has been done to provide citations, unreferenced entries could be removed. For edge cases, this Talk page is available for discussion about whether a particular work qualifies. Jd4v15 ( talk) 02:25, 8 February 2013 (UTC)
The result of the move request was: moved. Consensus is clear that "Bibliography of anthropology", however whether that changes the inclusion criteria is not clear and should be discussed further. It's worth noting that the change of title does mandate that the inclusion criteria change. It would also be appreciated if someone could rewrite the lead sentence now that it's been moved. Jenks24 ( talk) 12:51, 9 March 2013 (UTC)
List of important publications in anthropology →
Bibliography of anthropology – Per discussion above, a more general title would avoid subjective decisions about importance and allow broader content. This would require some changes to inclusion criteria and a minor rewrite of the lead section.
Cnilep (
talk) 02:50, 21 February 2013 (UTC)
Are you guys thinking of making significant contributions to justify the move to a much larger "bibliography of anthropology"? If it is simply a matter of (or confusion over) inclusion criteria, I do not see sufficient reasons to justify a move. The other disciplines and their "lists of important publications" seem to be doing just fine. Anthrophilos ( talk) 22:17, 25 February 2013 (UTC)
User:Anthrophilos, this is a new article
list of important publications in science series. I nominatednomintated those articles for deletion years ago. Unless lists of important publications are discussed elsewhere, it would be subjective for anyone to include such a list on wiki per
WP:N.
Curb Chain (
talk) 22:45, 25 February 2013 (UTC)
I am loath to suggest a quantitative measure for such a qualitative discipline, but one measure of a book's impact on the discipline is the number of times it has been cited. This does tend to favour some (but not all) older books, but it is a figure easily derived from Google scholar. It would take some of the subjective factor out of the selection of "importance." Schrauwers ( talk) 23:14, 25 February 2013 (UTC)
Anthrophilos asked me to comment here because I contributed the entry called List of important publications in psychology. My view is the following (I developed this view without reading the earlier views expressed in the paragraphs above; I read the above paragraphs only after writing this). In these social sciences, psychology, anthropology, and economics, there are Wikipedia entries entitled "List of important publications in ...." Sociology is different. In sociology, one finds Bibliography of sociology. Political science has neither. I think there is an advantage to having some uniformity in the social sciences.
I decided to look at the physical and natural sciences. They are divided too. Most (e.g., physics, chemistry, geology) have entries such as "List of important publications in...." Important publications in biology, however, were entered as "Bibliography...." Astronomy had no publications entry.
It is not that I believe that the majority is always right. I think, however, that because we are contributing to an encyclopedia, we ought to have a certain amount of uniformity in how we present information. The "List of important important publications in...." has developed organically over time. There is a degree of uniformity already in the form of the "List of important publications in ...." I therefore endorse the position that we maintain List of important publications in anthropology as it is and NOT create an entry called "Bibliography of anthropology." Iss246 ( talk) 03:41, 26 February 2013 (UTC)
I've made an attempt to rewrite the lede per the closer of the move discussion. Curb Chain ( talk) 13:28, 9 March 2013 (UTC)
While I take Manus at his word that people do refer to "Literary anthropology (including Anthropological science fiction)" as a thing, I'd still like to see some sources for the description, and while we're at it, for those of Biological anthropology and Archaeological anthropology (aka Archaeology). The text doesn't seem particularly problematic, but it's not quite of a piece with "The sky is blue." Cnilep ( talk) 00:10, 11 March 2013 (UTC)
Most of the article titles are redlinks. For now it seems more accurate to say that it is a list of publications by notable people, not notable publications. RockMagnetist ( talk) 05:07, 11 March 2013 (UTC)
Patrick Tierney, Darkness in El Dorado, 2000. Patrick Tierney's book was determined to be deliberately fraudulent. [1] [2] Or is that a reason for it to be in the Bibliography of anthropology? Star767 ( talk) 01:52, 14 March 2013 (UTC)
There are lots of books that have their own articles, who cares. Regardless of this book's merits or accuracy, Tierney is not an anthropologist and the book is not anthropology. Capuchinpilates ( talk) 00:02, 22 June 2024 (UTC)
It is confusing to have a set of chronological categories as well as subject categories - especially if the former are just for sociocultural anthropology. Probably there should be just one or the other. I think subjects would be the better choice, as the books would be arranged chronologically within each category anyway.
The organization of articles in Wikipedia is strongly in favor of separating social and cultural anthropology. Just look at the sidebar for this article, for example. Sociocultural anthropology is a sad little stub, just a dictionary definition, and has been that way since 2004. Finally, judging by hits on Google, the great majority people still separate the two. So a split would be a good idea. RockMagnetist ( talk) 05:29, 14 March 2013 (UTC)
The structure of this list appears to have been drawn up on the assumption that any field of study that includes "anthropology" in its name is a subfield of anthropology. Well, they aren't. I already removed the branch of Christian theology called anthropology, but we still have:
I suggest we get rid of these sections, or possibly keep literary anthropology as a subsection of sociocultural anthropology (but we'd have to find something to put in it first). Anthropology is broad and unwieldy enough without us annexing other disciplines based on their use of the same Greek construction.
Also, I'll go ahead and rename the archaeology section archaeology... nobody says 'archaeological anthropology'. Joe Roe ( talk) 22:07, 16 March 2013 (UTC)
There has been some discussion of what the inclusion criteria should be since the move, but they haven't been spelled out. Following other bibliographies under the umbrella of WikiProject Bibliographies, I suggest that we only include works that:
The latter proviso is to avoid including works like Syntactic Structures or The Selfish Gene, which are highly notable but only tangentially related to anthropology. Joe Roe ( talk) 12:13, 17 March 2013 (UTC)
Generally speaking, an internal link should appear the first time a concept or person is mentioned, but not each time the same concept or individual is named thereafter. Exceptions are made, e.g. for tables or infoboxes, but the standard is "consider whether the added value of linking a particular occurrence outweighs the consequent dilution of the value of other links" ( Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Linking). Personally, I find it excessive to have two, three, even four links to the same individual. It might be acceptable to link once from each major section (e.g. one link to Michael Tomasello under linguistic anthropology and one more under biological anthropology), but three links to Bronisław Malinowski within 15 lines of text seems ridiculous.
How should internal links be handled on this page? If it differs from the standard in the MOS, please offer justification for your suggestion. Cnilep ( talk) 03:39, 7 May 2013 (UTC)
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I'm struggling to understand why this list exists. I can see the need for a general Bibliography of anthropology but, since that hasn't been created yet, why create this subset of "important" publications?
In any case, I'm extremely sceptical that it's possible to have consistent conclusion critera for a list like this. How on earth can one decide on an even slightly objective definition of "important"? The lead makes a stab of it, listing "influence", "breakthroughs" and "topic creator". But it's a rare academic publication that doesn't either open up new areas of research, present new scientific knowledge, or exert an influence on later scholarship, those things being the very reason they exist. So all the criteria hinge on this word "significantly", but there's no mention of how you demonstrate significance. Sources that state as much, I assume, that being the only thing conforming to WP:V. But there aren't any such sources in the article and again you'll seldom find a positive (or even a negative) review of a publication that doesn't concede the work has some merit and influence. The works in the list at the moment are extremely eclectic, especially in the non-sociocultural sections: there are introductory textbooks, seemingly randomly chosen edited volumes, and one work that hasn't even been published yet!
I notice that at least one similar list in the see also, List of important publications in biology has already been merged into Bibliography of biology on these grounds. I'm strongly inclined to suggest we do the same with this list, widening its scope to include any work whether it's 'important' or not, unless someone can drastically improve the sourcing and the clarity of the inclusion criteria. joe•roe t• c 17:40, 19 January 2013 (UTC)
This article could use some improvement, but I don't see any pressing need to move it (or put it through the AfD process). The list as it stands is useful -- it orients newcomers to anthropology by providing some landmarks, which is a natural extension of the "Further Reading" lists on Wikipedia and other reference works -- and the contents are not all obviously wrong or trivial. I wouldn't object to turning it into a Bibliography of anthropology, but I agree with Cnilep that it wouldn't resolve the problem, since we'd still need to establish inclusion criteria. That said, if the list does get turned into a bibliography, please note that WikiProject Bibliographies has done a lot of work on this issue; there are plenty of good ideas about inclusion criteria on that project page.
As for the specific concerns with this list, I think a publication would reasonably qualify if it is described as important, influential, a "major work," etc., in standard introductory anthropology texts, or is heavily cited in the anthropological literature. Maunus' suggestion of anthropology books awards isn't bad, either. It should be easy to satisfy these criteria for obvious candidates like Boas, Frazer, Malinowski, or Levi-Strauss, and I think it would be a reasonable way to decide whether anthropologists consider a book like Guns, Germs, and Steel to be important in their field. After some work has been done to provide citations, unreferenced entries could be removed. For edge cases, this Talk page is available for discussion about whether a particular work qualifies. Jd4v15 ( talk) 02:25, 8 February 2013 (UTC)
The result of the move request was: moved. Consensus is clear that "Bibliography of anthropology", however whether that changes the inclusion criteria is not clear and should be discussed further. It's worth noting that the change of title does mandate that the inclusion criteria change. It would also be appreciated if someone could rewrite the lead sentence now that it's been moved. Jenks24 ( talk) 12:51, 9 March 2013 (UTC)
List of important publications in anthropology →
Bibliography of anthropology – Per discussion above, a more general title would avoid subjective decisions about importance and allow broader content. This would require some changes to inclusion criteria and a minor rewrite of the lead section.
Cnilep (
talk) 02:50, 21 February 2013 (UTC)
Are you guys thinking of making significant contributions to justify the move to a much larger "bibliography of anthropology"? If it is simply a matter of (or confusion over) inclusion criteria, I do not see sufficient reasons to justify a move. The other disciplines and their "lists of important publications" seem to be doing just fine. Anthrophilos ( talk) 22:17, 25 February 2013 (UTC)
User:Anthrophilos, this is a new article
list of important publications in science series. I nominatednomintated those articles for deletion years ago. Unless lists of important publications are discussed elsewhere, it would be subjective for anyone to include such a list on wiki per
WP:N.
Curb Chain (
talk) 22:45, 25 February 2013 (UTC)
I am loath to suggest a quantitative measure for such a qualitative discipline, but one measure of a book's impact on the discipline is the number of times it has been cited. This does tend to favour some (but not all) older books, but it is a figure easily derived from Google scholar. It would take some of the subjective factor out of the selection of "importance." Schrauwers ( talk) 23:14, 25 February 2013 (UTC)
Anthrophilos asked me to comment here because I contributed the entry called List of important publications in psychology. My view is the following (I developed this view without reading the earlier views expressed in the paragraphs above; I read the above paragraphs only after writing this). In these social sciences, psychology, anthropology, and economics, there are Wikipedia entries entitled "List of important publications in ...." Sociology is different. In sociology, one finds Bibliography of sociology. Political science has neither. I think there is an advantage to having some uniformity in the social sciences.
I decided to look at the physical and natural sciences. They are divided too. Most (e.g., physics, chemistry, geology) have entries such as "List of important publications in...." Important publications in biology, however, were entered as "Bibliography...." Astronomy had no publications entry.
It is not that I believe that the majority is always right. I think, however, that because we are contributing to an encyclopedia, we ought to have a certain amount of uniformity in how we present information. The "List of important important publications in...." has developed organically over time. There is a degree of uniformity already in the form of the "List of important publications in ...." I therefore endorse the position that we maintain List of important publications in anthropology as it is and NOT create an entry called "Bibliography of anthropology." Iss246 ( talk) 03:41, 26 February 2013 (UTC)
I've made an attempt to rewrite the lede per the closer of the move discussion. Curb Chain ( talk) 13:28, 9 March 2013 (UTC)
While I take Manus at his word that people do refer to "Literary anthropology (including Anthropological science fiction)" as a thing, I'd still like to see some sources for the description, and while we're at it, for those of Biological anthropology and Archaeological anthropology (aka Archaeology). The text doesn't seem particularly problematic, but it's not quite of a piece with "The sky is blue." Cnilep ( talk) 00:10, 11 March 2013 (UTC)
Most of the article titles are redlinks. For now it seems more accurate to say that it is a list of publications by notable people, not notable publications. RockMagnetist ( talk) 05:07, 11 March 2013 (UTC)
Patrick Tierney, Darkness in El Dorado, 2000. Patrick Tierney's book was determined to be deliberately fraudulent. [1] [2] Or is that a reason for it to be in the Bibliography of anthropology? Star767 ( talk) 01:52, 14 March 2013 (UTC)
There are lots of books that have their own articles, who cares. Regardless of this book's merits or accuracy, Tierney is not an anthropologist and the book is not anthropology. Capuchinpilates ( talk) 00:02, 22 June 2024 (UTC)
It is confusing to have a set of chronological categories as well as subject categories - especially if the former are just for sociocultural anthropology. Probably there should be just one or the other. I think subjects would be the better choice, as the books would be arranged chronologically within each category anyway.
The organization of articles in Wikipedia is strongly in favor of separating social and cultural anthropology. Just look at the sidebar for this article, for example. Sociocultural anthropology is a sad little stub, just a dictionary definition, and has been that way since 2004. Finally, judging by hits on Google, the great majority people still separate the two. So a split would be a good idea. RockMagnetist ( talk) 05:29, 14 March 2013 (UTC)
The structure of this list appears to have been drawn up on the assumption that any field of study that includes "anthropology" in its name is a subfield of anthropology. Well, they aren't. I already removed the branch of Christian theology called anthropology, but we still have:
I suggest we get rid of these sections, or possibly keep literary anthropology as a subsection of sociocultural anthropology (but we'd have to find something to put in it first). Anthropology is broad and unwieldy enough without us annexing other disciplines based on their use of the same Greek construction.
Also, I'll go ahead and rename the archaeology section archaeology... nobody says 'archaeological anthropology'. Joe Roe ( talk) 22:07, 16 March 2013 (UTC)
There has been some discussion of what the inclusion criteria should be since the move, but they haven't been spelled out. Following other bibliographies under the umbrella of WikiProject Bibliographies, I suggest that we only include works that:
The latter proviso is to avoid including works like Syntactic Structures or The Selfish Gene, which are highly notable but only tangentially related to anthropology. Joe Roe ( talk) 12:13, 17 March 2013 (UTC)
Generally speaking, an internal link should appear the first time a concept or person is mentioned, but not each time the same concept or individual is named thereafter. Exceptions are made, e.g. for tables or infoboxes, but the standard is "consider whether the added value of linking a particular occurrence outweighs the consequent dilution of the value of other links" ( Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Linking). Personally, I find it excessive to have two, three, even four links to the same individual. It might be acceptable to link once from each major section (e.g. one link to Michael Tomasello under linguistic anthropology and one more under biological anthropology), but three links to Bronisław Malinowski within 15 lines of text seems ridiculous.
How should internal links be handled on this page? If it differs from the standard in the MOS, please offer justification for your suggestion. Cnilep ( talk) 03:39, 7 May 2013 (UTC)
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