Maybe? It sounds like you’re imaging errors propagating through citations. Paper X cites paper Y, which in turn cites paper Z, so if there is an error in Z, X

Maybe? It sounds like you’re imaging errors propagating through citations. Paper X cites paper Y, which in turn cites paper Z, so if there is an error in Z, X and Y are—-or should be assumed to be--invalid. It doesn’t work like that. A few citations may be “critical” but a lot of them provide context and credit. Jones et al. first identified this problem. Smith tested several obvious but ultimately unsuccessful approaches. Here, we use the same methods as Wu and Lee. Our results differ from Cantorovich because.... Errors in those papers might make sections of the citing paper superfluous or less interesting but they don’t invalidate it. For ideas and methods, it might not even matter what the ultimate result was....