The obfuscation of this issue created by the lack of any discussion of whether he has seen actual
or sample contracts, and the lack of any citation to such contracts, is for us the most egregious
violation of academic integrity in the article. But there are numerous other serious problems:
citations that are wholly unrelated to claims made in the text (just one is noted above); claims in
the text of the article entirely at odds with the documents cited to support those claims; selective
use of documents and other materials to the exclusion of evidence to the contrary. Some of our
historian colleagues, including those far more knowledgeable than we on these issues, are
compiling an extensive list of such problems. They will be shared with the journal in due course,
or may have been shared by the time of this statement, and we believe our colleagues will make
that list public.
How important it is that historians scrutinize the work of others.
WW2 seems to have spawned a lot of "denialistic" "historical" work, but it's definitely not the only event to do so. In researching the Yugoslav wars of the 90s I've also come across a lot of suspicious (or, to be precise, wrong) claims, but never in peer-reviewed papers.
Thank you for posting this. Now I want to learn more about the debate surrounding the Ramseyer article.
3 replies
Quite interesting
