Some 20th-century scholars, including the American etymologist Kemp Malone (1889–1971), have argued that the reason for the differences between Pliny, Tacitus and Ptolemy when it comes to names and tribes is that their informants came from different regions, mainly familiar with the parts of Scandinavia closest to their own location: "The name "Scadinavia" (with its variant forms) reached the classical world through western sources, and [...] Tacitus, whose information about the North came from the east, knows nothing of the name, in contradistinction to Pliny, who got his information from the west." Malone goes on to argue that Ptolemy also based his account about the island Skandia and its Scandinavian tribes on western sources, and that this is the reason that Ptolemy does not have any Suiones or "Swedes" among the tribes on Skandia, but may instead have placed them among the tribes on the southeastern Baltic coast.