Over at SA Perspectives, Bernard Leong uses the fact that only 22% of SA articles contain proper citations as evidence that SA is not “academic”:

What [the 22% figure] means is that for every five articles a SA author writes, only one can be treated as a serious article by academic standards i.e. with proper references and footnotes. That means the impression of SA bloggers indulging in writing academic articles in this blog is exaggerated.

Here BL seems to be equating proper citations with being an academic article. Whether one agrees with that or not, let us accept it for the time being. That means, however, that he thinks there is a pervasive impression that SA indulges in writing articles with proper citations. As others have pointed out in the comments there, this is in fact not the case: any complaints I’ve read about SA have to do with the nature of its commentary, rather than whether it has citations. Whatever lies behind the accusation of SA being “academic”, it is not the number of citations. So if SA wants to defuse that reputation, it has to bring up a figure other than number of citations.

I would also like to highlight another confusion in BL’s article. He characterises analysis articles as those involving the use of numbers and figures. Anything without numbers and figures, and which is not a report or interview or something similarly journalistic, is pigeonholed as “commentary” instead of analysis. I beg to differ. Analysis can occur at two levels: one can analyse the logical structure of an argument, or one can analyse the premises of an argument. The logical structure is what legitimises the processes of inference used in the argument. The premises must be backed up by facts, or, in iffier cases, commonly accepted intuitions. Therefore analysing facts and figures is only one half of the picture of analysis. Pointing out a logical fallacy in an argument is most definitely not mere “commentary”. Logical fallacies and contradictions are walls that are just as hard as facts are, constricting our possible moves in the space of ideas.

A hard-nosed analysis of facts is completely useless unless it is complemented with a rigorous argument for why the facts imply a certain conclusion. Waving some numbers about doesn’t mean anything unless one can make a case for why they imply what one thinks they imply. Sadly, in BL’s article, there are plenty of facts, but no rigorous argument. It falls at the first hurdle when it wrongly assumes that readers are complaining that SA has too many footnotes.