Richard Tol is quite busy trying out for his new career as a web based comedian over at twitter. If there is one thing that Cook et al. are to be thanked for it is the meltdowns that they have set off at Lucia's and Tol's. Eli has been having a bit of fun here and there, but he needs to share the glory with Tom Curtis at Brisbane's Waters and our friend Willard in the comments at Rabett Run, Dana and many others.
To be honest, and Eli is an honest Rabett, Tol has dug this one so deep that he has called out the Chewbacca team.
I have one final thing I want you to consider. Ladies and gentlemen, this is Richard Tol. Richard Tol is a famous scientist economist who was the scholar most-cited by the Stern Review of the Economics of Climate Change. Richard Tol comes from the Netherlands. But Richard Tol lives on the planet England. Now think about it; that does not make sense! Why would a Tol, an 8-foot-tall Tol with very bad hair living under a bridge somewhere, want to publish 122 qualified papers while the bunch of 2-foot-tall Ewoks lead by John Cook can only find 10 of them? Even though that is what was found in Web of Science using the search strings written about in the paper that the 2-foot-tall Ewoks lead by John Cook published. That does not make sense! But more important, you have to ask yourself: What does this have to do with this case? Nothing. Ladies and gentlemen, it has nothing to do with this case! It does not make sense!
And Richard Tol thinks some of the abstracts from those miserly only 10 papers out of 122 from the the scholar most-cited by the Stern Review of the Economics of Climate Change were rated differently (only slightly) from what Richard Tol the scholar most-cited by the Stern Review of the Economics of Climate Change would have if he had replied to the invitation to provide his own rating from those 2-foot-tall Ewoks lead by John Cook.
Especially when they excluded all those scientifical journals from the underbelly of scientific publishing like the Journal of Scientific Exploration and the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons, the ones that come in plain brown wrappers and are stored under the shelf at the Sky Dragon Megastore. Journals that are open access because you have to give them away, and even then no one takes them and certainly no one except Willard Tony reads them. Look at me. I'm the scholar most-cited by the Stern Review of the Economics of Climate Change, and I'm talkin' about Richard Tol! Does that make sense? Ladies and gentlemen, I am not making any sense! None of this makes sense! And so you have to remember, when you're in that jury room deliberating and conjugating the future of poptech, , does it make sense? No! Ladies and gentlemen of this supposed jury, it does not make sense! If Richard Tol lives on England, you must acquit! The defense rests.
Anyhoo, this one has morphed from Tol's original cry of
- Why did you only rate 10 of my 122 qualified papers.
Short Answer: Because the Web of Science Topic search using the terms "global warming" and "global climate change" for articles (not books, not proceedings) published between 1991 and May 2012 only found 10.
Longer Answer:
WoS only looks at a subset of all journals and mostly at scientific journals. Web of Knowledge is more complete.
But comprehensive does not necessarily mean all-inclusive.1
It would appear that to be comprehensive, an index of the scholarly
journal literature might be expected to cover all journals published. It
has been demonstrated, however, that a relatively small number of
journals publish the majority of significant scholarly results. This
principle is often referred to as Bradford's Law.
In the mid-1930's, British mathematician and librarian S.C. Bradford
realized that the core literature for any given scientific discipline
was composed of fewer than 1,000 journals. . . .
Each year, the Thomson Reuters editorial staff reviews over 2,000 journal titles for inclusion in Web of Science.
Around 10-12% of the journals evaluated are accepted for coverage.
Moreover, existing journal coverage in Thomson Reuters products is
constantly under review. Journals now covered are monitored to ensure
that they are maintaining high standards and a clear relevance to the
products in which they are covered.
If you go through the sKs database for the ABSTRACTS that were rated you find that, for example, Judith Curry only has five and Mike Mann two. This, however, raises an interesting point as to whether the ratings should be normalized so that no one author has many more ratings than another.
Willard put it well
@nevaudit
Web of Science is not Web of Richard, - So, what search tool would you use, ? Would we need the code too?
Then there is Richards complaint that the ABSTRACT ratings were wrong, to which there are two answers: a) respond to the survey that Cook et al sent to the authors and b) read your own damn abstracts.
Willard not Tony and
Tom have more to say about that.
And finally Rabett Run comes to true dispair
@RichardTol
which Barry Bickmore dispatches
@BarryBickmore1
It is pretty hard to top all this, but, somewhere, somewhere in there Richard tries
@RichardTol
as Eli pointed out, it would be good if Richard at least tried.