burrkitty wrote:The 3-deep clause is a... concept? rule? teaching aid?... Basically, it works like this. One should not reference your unique work with a paper that you cannot "prove" 3-deep. So for any scientific paper that you wish to use in your own work you must "prove" it.
1. You read the paper.
2. You read all the references of that paper
3. You read all the references of the references of that paper.
That is how you prove a paper 3-deep.
As I was taught, the 3-deep clause is intended to minimize suspect material. This is because of how peer-reviewed science works.
This is new to me, and kind of interesting. I do not guess anyone really does it, not twice. One or two papers with extensive note lists and the combinatorial explosion of spadework would be awful. In some papers, you see lines like "Efforts to account for the discrepancy by direct calculation have had questionable success. (Fitzhugh[1941]; Davies, Davies, Davies and Thomas[1948]; Martindale[1949]; Oh, Fralins and Dixit[1951]; [14 other references] ; Hedley[2012])" What a nightmare. All to prove that, well, the thing we didn't do might be of some value, but then again, who's to tell? I mean, yes, a bit of duplication will be there and someone with a serious knowledge of the field would have already read many of the papers, but it's still a lot of meaningless labor. I would also question the value of it beyond as a training exercise for someone initially becoming acquainted with the field. Surely many papers present direct observations, which are not dependent for validity on much that is in prior papers, only on the integrity and method of the author. Selected reading in depth, maybe, to ensure you understand the key points that you are taking from the paper, but all of it? On top of that, the time you spend doing things matters and delaying submitting for publication while you earnestly plow through every paper Davies, Davies, Davies or Thomas thought relevent during the Truman Administration, when no one will know whether you actually did or not, seems unlikely in the extreme.
Also, there is some gamesmanship available in the standard if applied, in fields where there is competition for attention. If yours is one of five groups attempting to recreate or expand upon a result, you could be careful to cite as small a number of references as possible, each of which itself has a minimal number of references. This would give you some significant edge in later being cited.
All a bit in jest. More seriously, I cannot see what 3-deep reading has to do with any of it. Studying a subject 3-deep is neither taught to, nor imposed on, nor practical for, nor needed by the layman, the journalist or the policymaker. Yes, they should dive into things and examine premises and assumptions, but what to dive into and how deep is a practical matter. A person wanting to form their own conclusion about some complicated and controversial topic may have to devote their life to it or give up. A layman wanting to form a conclusion about how much CO2 is in the atmosphere, on the other hand, does not have to go "3-deep" into the Moana Loa readings; they can grab the graph off google and it's right. Indeed, the point of much of the best summaries out there, especially IPCC, is to provide something you can read where someone else did all that 3-deep stuff in a public process so readers can get precise and up-to-date information and be informed without switching careers.