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• 1 2014-05-01T04:31:25-07:00 Mapping E-waste as a Controversy: From Statements to Debates II 13 split 2014-05-06T03:53:30-07:00 As I suggested in my discussion of Adam Minter's (2013) article, an important part of the e-waste controversy is the trustworthiness of statistics cited to characterize the scope of e-waste as a problem. One of the key figures that circulates in the peer reviewed literature about e-waste is the claim from BAN (2002) that 50-80 percent of electronics collected for recycling in the US are exported. I have followed that statement along a trajectory into the realm of formal politics where BAN's figure plays an explicit role in framing the debate about e-waste in the US (United States Congress, 2009). What happens when we follow another trajectory, one defined by the peer reviewed literature that cites BAN's (2002) report Exporting Harm? To follow this trajectory we can do a cited reference search using Web of Science. BAN's report is cited in slightly different ways by different authors. Web of Science has search functions to find these various iterations of citations of the same report as is illustrated in this figure. The Web of Science database shows us that Exporting Harm (BAN, 2002) has been cited 92 times as of 23 April 2014. Using the "Citation Report" function of Web of Science we gain a sense of how BAN's report has been incorporated into the peer reviewed literature over time. The citation report indicates a robust presence of BAN's report in the peer reviewed literature. As of 6 May 2014 there were 942 peer reviewed articles with "e-waste", "electronic waste", or "electronic scrap" among their topic keywords in the Web of Science database. Examining the citation report for those 942 articles reveals that if Exporting Harm were a peer reviewed article it would rank as the 15th most cited article amongst this larger group of 942 articles.  Put another way, Exporting Harm, a non-peer reviewed report, has been cited more often than 98 percent of all peer reviewed articles on e-waste in the Web of Science database. This is an indication of a tremendous degree of influence that the report has within the e-waste research community.