[jannic]

I guess the original publication which listed the high iron content of spinach was:

Bunge, G.. 'Weitere Untersuchungen über die Aufnahme des Eisens in den Organismus des Säuglings'. Zeitschrift für Physiologische Chemie, 16 (1892)

http://echo.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/ECHOdocuView?url=/permanent/...

If that's true, then indeed, it was not a misplaced decimal point. Instead, Bunge listed the iron contents of dried food.

[danieltillett]

It is interesting that the paper does not actually cite the original paper. I guess it is not critical to the paper, but it does complete the story.

This does bring up a important point in that is old scientific publications in languages other than english. I have many times run into references in German, French or Russian that are only available as low quality scanned pdfs. As a monolingual English speaker these are completely inaccessible to me. I would be great to have all of them OCRed so at least we can run them through Google Translate.

[jannic]

It seems more interesting to me that Rekdal doesn't cite this article:

http://www.bestthinking.com/articles/science/chemistry/bioch...

It's a 2012 followup by Mike Sutton to the two publications from 2010. It contains many new details, including a reference to Bunge (1892).

Perhaps, one should not only try to cite the original source, but also look for recent research on the same topic?

[OBRekdal]

A small anecdote on this point. I first sent the article to a journal where the editors insisted that I say something about Bunge and the other German scientists involved in the early history. I refused, because it would have taken attention away from the main topic of the article, and sent the article to SSS instead.

[logicallee]

Wow. This academic paper we just read on academic urban legends has an urban legend payload - I now believed there was a "misplaced decimal point" (i.e. typo) in a single source, that then became the source of an academic urban legend about spinach.