[retsibsi]

There is a middle ground: spend a few hours verifying a small sample of the citations. This still takes more time, effort, and ability than most readers will have to spare, but it is feasible and would be enough to expose the worst offenders. Of course it can't guarantee that every study cited in the book is reliable, but it can give you a sense of how accurately the author characterises the studies and how carefully (s)he has chosen them. And if you choose your sample carefully, you can directly verify the claims that you care most about.

(Even better if this is done collaboratively, for a larger sample and less time spent per person.)

> for ~99.9% of readers, the argument presented will end up working solely as an authority argument

Agreed, but an author's authority can still be undermined or reinforced by expert opinion. In an ideal world where book reviews were written by qualified, careful people with time to do a thorough job, the existence of citations would be extremely important, even if hardly any ordinary readers looked at them. Obviously we don't live in that world, but sloppy scholarship is often exposed eventually.

[westoncb]

That's definitely a better, more realistic process than what I described.

> Agreed, but an author's authority can still be undermined or reinforced by expert opinion.

That's a good point. Actually, that's probably how I will try to validate this book (or others like it): I'll give the 'okay', once I see some unassociated other researchers confirming that the work is good, conclusions drawn are not a stretch etc.