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THOUGHTS ON TESTIMONY TO THE PARANORMAL

pascal-francis.inist.fr 11 September 2026 at 12:35 View original article →

The original link is the material being checked. It may contain false or misleading claims — we link for transparency, not endorsement.

78/100
Verdict Mixed Largely Reliable — Structural Metadata Verified, Item-Level Details Unverified (Low-Risk Bibliographic Record)

The ingested text is not a substantive article but a machine-generated bibliographic record (notice) from the PASCAL database archive operated by Inist-CNRS, describing a 1982 item attributed to 'WEST DJ' of the University of Cambridge Institute of Criminology, published in 'Parapsychol.

✓ 8 checks out ✕ 1 disputed ? 6 unverified
☰ Full analysis The complete summary ⌄

The ingested text is not a substantive article but a machine-generated bibliographic record (notice) from the PASCAL database archive operated by Inist-CNRS, describing a 1982 item attributed to 'WEST DJ' of the University of Cambridge Institute of Criminology, published in 'Parapsychol. Rev.' (ISSN 0031-1804), USA, vol. 13, no. 5, pp. 1-8, with one page of bibliography, indexed under Pascal classes 002 / 002A / 002A26 and the discipline 'Psychology. Ethology'. All structural and contextual elements that can be externally tested were corroborated: Parapsychology Review was a real bimonthly published from 1970 to 1990 by the New York-based Parapsychology Foundation (https://www.encyclopedia.com/science/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/parapsychology-review-journal; https://psi-encyclopedia.spr.ac.uk/articles/parapsychology-foundation/); volume 13 does correspond to 1982, as shown by independent citations such as 'Rao, K. R. (1982) ... Parapsychology Review 13:1-6' and 'Hyman, R. (1982) ... Parapsychology Review 13:(2) 24-27' (https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/behavioral-and-brain-sciences/article/abs/status-of-parapsychology/A913EA0E7FA9D5B616DEBB75A221FF6D); Donald J. West (1924-2020) was a Cambridge criminologist with a genuine, lifelong parapsychological output and was in fact Director of the Institute of Criminology from 1981 to 1984, i.e. at the stated date (https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/bjpsych-bulletin/article/donald-west-md-littd-frcpsych/B04E12740F77318BE94C5941D360BF54; https://psi-encyclopedia.spr.ac.uk/articles/donald-west/); and the record's identifier syntax, classification string and trilingual CC BY 4.0 rights statement match live PASCAL records exactly (https://pascal-francis.inist.fr/vibad/index.php?action=getRecordDetail&idt=PASCAL82X0145047). Two things could NOT be confirmed with accessible up-to-date sources and are therefore marked Unverified rather than False: (a) the mapping of ISSN 0031-1804 specifically to Parapsychology Review, which could not be retrieved from the ISSN Portal or an equivalent registry during this assessment; and (b) the existence of the individual West item at 13(5), pp. 1-8 — no independent citation of that exact article surfaced, and the record as ingested is missing its title field. The text carries essentially no rhetorical or persuasive content (emotion_score 0.02, self_reference_count 0), so bias risk is minimal; the principal risk to a reader is not deception but incompleteness, link truncation and the impossibility of subject-level verification without consulting the original notice.

What checked out (8)
  • VERIFIED (secondary, multiple): 'Parapsychology Review' was a genuine periodical, published bimonthly from 1970 to 1990 by the Parapsychology Foundation, carrying news, book reviews and obituaries — Encyclopedia.com (https://www.encyclopedia.com/science/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/parapsychology-review-journal) and the SPR Psi Encyclopedia, which records it as the bimonthly successor (1970-1990) to the Foundation's Newsletter (https://psi-encyclopedia.spr.ac.uk/articles/parapsychology-foundation/).
  • VERIFIED (secondary): The 'USA' country-of-publication field is consistent with the publisher being the New York-based Parapsychology Foundation, founded 1951 by Eileen J. Garrett and Frances Payne Bolton, with a New York address of record (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parapsychology_Foundation; https://www.encyclopedia.com/science/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/newsletter-parapsychology-foundation).
  • VERIFIED (secondary, multiple independent reference lists): The volume/year concordance 'VOL. 13 = 1982' is correct — third-party bibliographies cite 'Rao, K. R. (1982) Science and the legitimacy of psi. Parapsychology Review 13:1-6' and 'Hyman, R. (1982) ... Parapsychology Review 13:(2) 24-27' (https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/behavioral-and-brain-sciences/article/abs/status-of-parapsychology/A913EA0E7FA9D5B616DEBB75A221FF6D; https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/behavioral-and-brain-sciences/article/abs/parapsychology-science-of-the-anomalous-or-search-for-nonmaterial-aspects-of-human-existence/9C031ACC83136052FA878C2A7D45EC6D).
  • VERIFIED (secondary, multiple): The author-affiliation pairing 'WEST DJ / Univ. Cambridge, Inst. Criminology / GBR' is plausible and date-appropriate: Donald James West (9 June 1924 - 31 January 2020) was a British psychiatrist and parapsychologist who joined the Cambridge Institute of Criminology in 1960, was its Director from 1981 until his retirement in 1984, and held a personal Chair in Clinical Criminology (https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/bjpsych-bulletin/article/donald-west-md-littd-frcpsych/B04E12740F77318BE94C5941D360BF54; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_J._West).
  • VERIFIED (secondary/authoritative): The subject pairing of West with parapsychology is genuine, not a mis-indexing artefact — the SPR records that he joined as a teenager, contributed to its Journal and Proceedings from 1941, and shared the 1958 McDougall Award for distinguished work in parapsychology (https://www.spr.ac.uk/about/people/donald-west; https://psi-encyclopedia.spr.ac.uk/articles/donald-west/).
  • VERIFIED (primary, database operator): PASCAL is a bibliographic database produced by Inist-CNRS covering 1972-2015, now openly archived alongside FRANCIS with over 20 million references (https://www.inist.fr/realisations/pascal-et-francis-en-libre-acces/; https://searchworks.stanford.edu/view/12904290; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PASCAL_(database)).
  • VERIFIED (primary, live comparable records): The classification chain '002 Biological and medical sciences / 002A Fundamental and applied biological sciences. Psychology / 002A26 ... Psychophysiology' with Discipline 'Psychology. Ethology', Origin 'Inist-CNRS', Database 'PASCAL', and identifiers of the form 'PASCAL82X…' are exactly the fields and values used in live PASCAL notices (https://pascal-francis.inist.fr/vibad/index.php?action=getRecordDetail&idt=PASCAL82X0145047; https://pascal-francis.inist.fr/vibad/index.php?action=getRecordDetail&idt=PASCAL7650230485).
  • VERIFIED (primary): The trilingual rights statement reproduced verbatim in the ingested text ('…may be used under a CC BY 4.0 licence by Inist-CNRS…') is the standard footer appearing on Pascal/Francis record pages (https://pascal-francis.inist.fr/vibad/index.php?action=getRecordDetail&idt=4595123; https://pascal-francis.inist.fr/vibad/index.php?action=getRecordDetail&idt=13130873).
✕ Disputed claims 1 claim ⌄
  • No contradiction was found between any field in the record and the external evidence retrieved; the two open questions (ISSN mapping and item-level pagination) are classified as Unverified, not False.
? Unverified claims 6 claims ⌄
  • UNVERIFIED: That ISSN 0031-1804 is the ISSN of Parapsychology Review. Targeted registry searches did not return an ISSN Portal record for this number; retrieved 0031-xxxx portal records were for unrelated titles (e.g. https://portal.issn.org/resource/ISSN/0031-1480). The assignment is plausible and internally consistent but is not corroborated here, so it is neither confirmed nor contradicted.
  • UNVERIFIED: The existence of the specific item attributed to West at Parapsychology Review 1982;13(5):1-8 with 'BIBL. 1 P.'. No independent citation of this exact article, pagination or issue was located; only other 1982 volume-13 items (Rao 13:1-6; Hyman 13(2):24-27) were found (https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/behavioral-and-brain-sciences/article/abs/parapsychologys-choice/28202E40D2D7439EBDBAD45D755405F8).
  • UNVERIFIED: The article's title and subject matter. The ingested text contains no title field at all — the notice appears truncated/stripped during extraction — so no claim about what the article argues can be assessed.
  • UNVERIFIED: That INIST identifier PASCAL82X0326443 resolves to this particular record. The specific record page was not retrieved during research; only sibling records with the same identifier syntax were confirmed (https://pascal-francis.inist.fr/vibad/index.php?action=getRecordDetail&idt=PASCAL82X0145047).
  • UNVERIFIED: The keyword set and 'Document type: Article' designation for this item. Note also that the Spanish keyword renders as 'PSICOLOGIA' where the English/French terms are 'PARAPSYCHOLOGY'/'PARAPSYCHOLOGIE'; this may be a genuine indexing inconsistency in the source record or an extraction artefact, and cannot be resolved without the original notice.
  • UNVERIFIED (presentation, not fact): The truncated bracket-and-parenthesis link fragments (e.g. '[WEST DJ](', '[002A26](') indicate a lossy scrape of the source page rather than any substantive error; the integrity of the underlying notice could not be confirmed from the extracted text alone.
⌕ Sources & how we checked Search journal, source grades, confidence ⌄
Confidence

Medium-High (72%) — Confidence is high for everything structurally testable and moderate for the item itself. Four independent evidentiary strands — Inist-CNRS's own live records, the SPR/Psi Encyclopedia, a Cambridge University Press obituary, and peer-reviewed Behavioral and Brain Sciences reference lists — converge on the record's provenance, licence footer, classification scheme, journal identity and span, the 1982 volume-13 concordance, and West's Cambridge affiliation and role at that date, with no contradictions anywhere in the evidence set. Confidence is held below 'High' for three reasons: the ISSN 0031-1804 mapping resisted two separate registry approaches; no independent citation of the specific West item at 13(5), pp. 1-8 could be located, and 1982 newsletter content is thinly digitised, so absence of evidence is weak evidence of absence; and the ingested text is a lossy scrape missing its title field, which structurally caps verification of subject matter. The trust score of 78 reflects a well-provenanced, low-risk, non-persuasive metadata record whose remaining uncertainty is concentrated in two narrow identifiers rather than in any substantive assertion. Retrieving the PASCAL notice and an ISSN registry entry would plausibly move the score into the high 80s; a confirmed mismatch on either would reduce it toward the low 60s.

Search journal

"Parapsychology Review" ISSN 0031-1804

"Parapsychology Review" Parapsychology Foundation New York 1970 1981 journal ceased

Donald J. West Cambridge Institute of Criminology parapsychology psychical research professor

PASCAL database Inist-CNRS bibliographic records CC BY 4.0 licence

"0031-1804" ISSN journal

West "Parapsychology Review" 1982 volume 13 article

pascal-francis.inist.fr PASCAL82X0326443

PASCAL classification "002A26" psychophysiology Inist

"Parapsychology Review" volume 13 1982 Parapsychology Foundation bimonthly

Donald West Institute of Criminology 1982 director Cambridge professor clinical criminology

"Parapsychology Review" Parapsychology Foundation New York publications list

portal.issn.org "Parapsychology review"

"West" "Parapsychology Review" 1982 "13" thirty years psychical research article citation

Article metrics

Emotion 2% · Reading grade 13.7 · 123 words

≡ The article we checked Full text as retrieved ⌄
Permanent link CopyPermanent link Author[WEST DJ]( UNIV. CAMBRIDGE, INST. CRIMINOLOGY/CAMBRIDGE/GBR Source PARAPSYCHOL. REV.; ISSN 0031-1804; USA; DA. 1982; VOL. 13; NO 5; PP. 1-8; BIBL. 1 P.Document type Article Language English Keyword (fr)[PARAPSYCHOLOGIE]( (en)[PARAPSYCHOLOGY]( (es)[PSICOLOGIA]( Pascal[002]( and medical sciences]( / [002A]( and applied biological sciences. Psychology]( / [002A26]( Psychophysiology]( Discipline[Psychology. Ethology]( Inist-CNRS Database PASCAL INIST identifier PASCAL82X0326443 Sauf mention contraire ci-dessus, le contenu de cette notice bibliographique peut être utilisé dans le cadre d’une licence CC BY 4.0 Inist-CNRS / Unless otherwise stated above, the content of this bibliographic record may be used under a CC BY 4.0 licence by Inist-CNRS / A menos que se haya señalado antes, el contenido de este registro bibliográfico puede ser utilizado al amparo de una licencia CC BY 4.0 Inist-CNRS

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