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I don't think this sort of thing is all that unusual. I once did a web-of-science search for citations to a foundational paper in my field. It was published i

I don't think this sort of thing is all that unusual. I once did a web-of-science search for citations to a foundational paper in my field. It was published in volume 13 of a particular journal, and that was listed in a little over 90% of the citations, but the other citations all listed the journal as 113. My assumption is that somebody cited it in error, and that others were basically copying the citation from the bibliography, rather than going back to the original paper to get the original metadata. Does this mean that about 10% of writers were basically lying about having read the original paper? Well, maybe. But I fear that the number might be higher than 10%, because the correct citations might also have resulted from just copying from a bibliography. I tell this story to my students, in hopes that they will actually read the original papers. Quite a few take my advice to heart. Alas, not all do.

RC_ITR 4y ago
This is somewhat a criticism of how contemporary citations work though. Primitive science (or even pre-publishing science) doesn't get cited because humanity figured it out before our current system was in place. It may sound silly, but no one feels the need to cite Eratosthenes when implying the world is round. But many people do feel the need to cite the colorimetric determination for phosphorus (an SCI top 100 paper) even though it was published 100 years ago and is generally considered “base-level science.” It is certainly an interesting paper to read, but I’m not sure I need every scientist to read it in order to believe they know how to do colorimetric analysis.
- yccs27 4y ago
  Papers get cited for very different reasons, from "historically significant paper cited in the introduction" over "related work we're building upon" to "this proves a statement/theorem we're using". It might make sense to start categorizing citations in some way. Only for some categories I expect the authors to have read the cited paper. Some of them don't necessarily mean the cited paper is high quality. Some are recommended reading to understand the original paper, some are'nt
  - Ekaros 4y ago
    I wonder what fraction of citations are there for sake of having citations in a paper. That is something we were trained for as undergraduates. Fact that we should include enough citations just for sake of it.
actuallyalys 4y ago
I'd be curious to know whether the percentage of incorrect citations varies over time. I would guess more recent authors would be more likely to search by title in Google Scholar or SciHub (or use the DOI link, if available) rather than actually use the volume and page number, which could result in more authors who did read the article nonetheless getting the volume number wrong.
marcosdumay 4y ago
Or maybe that's because somebody published a bibtex entry for that paper that got that volume number wrong and those people just copied and pasted the entry without reading.
- Eddy_Viscosity2 4y ago
  Indeed. I don't really ever go to the actual original journal of an old (pre digital) paper, instead I search the internet for pdf that someone already scanned in and then, ideally, also download the accompanying bibtex.
gwern 4y ago
There's a semi-famous line of research by Simkin which uses citation copying errors as 'radioactive tracers' to estimate the rate of copying & nonreading, under the logic that (in a pre-digital age), you could not possibly have repeated the '113' error if you got an ILL copy or physically consulted volume '13' (if only because you would be pissed at wasting your time either checking volume 113 first or verifying there's no such thing as volume 113): https://www.gwern.net/Leprechauns#citogenesis-how-often-do-researchers-not-read-the-papers-they-cite https://www.gwern.net/Leprechauns#citogenesis-how-often-do-r... Your 10% isn't far off from the 10-30% estimates people get, so not bad.

RC_ITR 4y ago

This is somewhat a criticism of how contemporary citations work though. Primitive science (or even pre-publishing science) doesn't get cited because humanity figured it out before our current system was in place. It may sound silly, but no one feels the need to cite Eratosthenes when implying the world is round. But many people do feel the need to cite the colorimetric determination for phosphorus (an SCI top 100 paper) even though it was published 100 years ago and is generally considered “base-level science.” It is certainly an interesting paper to read, but I’m not sure I need every scientist to read it in order to believe they know how to do colorimetric analysis.

yccs27 4y ago
Papers get cited for very different reasons, from "historically significant paper cited in the introduction" over "related work we're building upon" to "this proves a statement/theorem we're using". It might make sense to start categorizing citations in some way. Only for some categories I expect the authors to have read the cited paper. Some of them don't necessarily mean the cited paper is high quality. Some are recommended reading to understand the original paper, some are'nt
- Ekaros 4y ago
  I wonder what fraction of citations are there for sake of having citations in a paper. That is something we were trained for as undergraduates. Fact that we should include enough citations just for sake of it.

actuallyalys 4y ago

I'd be curious to know whether the percentage of incorrect citations varies over time. I would guess more recent authors would be more likely to search by title in Google Scholar or SciHub (or use the DOI link, if available) rather than actually use the volume and page number, which could result in more authors who did read the article nonetheless getting the volume number wrong.

marcosdumay 4y ago

Or maybe that's because somebody published a bibtex entry for that paper that got that volume number wrong and those people just copied and pasted the entry without reading.

Eddy_Viscosity2 4y ago
Indeed. I don't really ever go to the actual original journal of an old (pre digital) paper, instead I search the internet for pdf that someone already scanned in and then, ideally, also download the accompanying bibtex.

gwern 4y ago

There's a semi-famous line of research by Simkin which uses citation copying errors as 'radioactive tracers' to estimate the rate of copying & nonreading, under the logic that (in a pre-digital age), you could not possibly have repeated the '113' error if you got an ILL copy or physically consulted volume '13' (if only because you would be pissed at wasting your time either checking volume 113 first or verifying there's no such thing as volume 113): https://www.gwern.net/Leprechauns#citogenesis-how-often-do-researchers-not-read-the-papers-they-cite https://www.gwern.net/Leprechauns#citogenesis-how-often-do-r... Your 10% isn't far off from the 10-30% estimates people get, so not bad.