Questions 26 - 38
A hoax of some note was apparently perpetrated on (Appleton's Cyclopedia of American Biography), an important American biographical dictionary that was published in 1889. This extensive and well-regarded reference was published with a number of biographies of scientists who most likely never existed or who never actually undertook the research cited in the biographical dictionary.
It was not until some 30 years after {Appleton's Cyclopedia{ was first published that word of the fake biographies began cropping up. It was noted in a 1919 article in the {Journal of the New York Botanical Garden{ that at least 14 of the biographies of botanists were fake. Then, in 1937, an article in the {American Historical Review { declared that at least 18 more biographies were false.
The source of the false biographies is not known to this day, but a look at a number of steps in the process by which articles were submitted to the biographical encyclopedia sheds some light on how such a hoax could have occurred. First, contributors were paid by the number and length of articles submitted, and the contributors themselves, as experts in their respective fields, were invited to suggest new names for inclusion. Then the false biographies were created in such a way as to make verification of facts by the publisher extremely difficult in an era without the instantaneous communication of today: the false biographies were all about people who supposedly had degrees from foreign institutions and who had published their research findings in non-English language publications outside of the United States. Finally, the reference itself provides a long list of contributors but does not list which articles each of the contributors submitted, and, because the hoax was not discovered until well after the reference was first published, the publishing company no longer had records of who had submitted the false information.
Unfortunately, the false information about historical research did not disappear with the final publication of the book. Though it is now out of print, many libraries have copies of this comprehensive and, for the most part, highly useful reference. Even more significant is the fact that a number of false citations from {Appleton's Cyclopedia{ have cropped up in other reference sources and have now become part of the established chronicle of scientific and historical research.
