Bamblog

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Probably everyone in academics is familiar with a specification of Murphy’s Law: “Interesting and relevant literature becomes always available the day after you finish a final version of a paper/book.”.

Well, I’ve discovered a new instance of Murphy’s law:

“Interesting and relevant literature becomes always available a few days before you finish a final version of a paper/book.”

This one is even worse than the first kind: Because you get this nagging feeling of guilt if you decide to pretend you haven’t seen the new reference (”Study? What kind of study? Where? On the Internet? Never heard of it…”) and omit it from your work.

In my case, I’m in the final stage of preparing my Ph.D. manuscript for print. I’ve already updated several subchapters, including some new literature on ICANN, and even did some new data analysis on PageViews/Visits of major german local newspapers and city portals (using data by the IVW). So it was basically formatting/editing and a last check of the printout, but then I stumbled across two new empirical studies dealing with e-democracy on the local level:

- “Neue Medien und Bürgerbeteiligung” by the Bertelsmann-Stiftung, and
- “Elektronische Bürgerbeteiligung in deutschen Großstädten 2004″ by the “Initiative e-participation”

*sigh* I guess I have to at least cross-read them and probably add some footnotes…

[Update: *WAAAAGHGGHHHH* It is getting even worse: I just noticed that the new “ARD/ZDF Online Studie 2004″ is out… Three papers - available here, german only - with new data on German onliners, offliners and on different user types… I’m afraid a footnote won’t do…]