In an earlier life, I did a deep dive into academic publications on simulating camera lens blur computationally. Nearly every paper that mentioned the topic ci

In an earlier life, I did a deep dive into academic publications on simulating camera lens blur computationally. Nearly every paper that mentioned the topic cited the same original work for the same numerical result. The result in question was clearly a reasonable result (you could derive it yourself with a quick hand-waving calculation). The problem was it wasn't actually mentioned in that original paper. And yes, many of these papers with the incorrect citations were written by the greats of the computer graphics field. At the time, I talked about this with friends who were academics from a wide range of different disciplines. No one was surprised. This isn't at all unusual. The reality is copy-and-paste damage happens all the time in the published academic literature. It's not a sign that every author is an evil malicious fake news generating bad actor. It's a sign that writing papers is a huge amount of work, frequently with tight deadlines, and every human faced with that context (a) is imperfect and (b) focuses their attention on what matters. If you want to build a data mining machine to find witches or communists or whatever word you want to apply to supposedly "bad" people, your data mining machine will find people to blame, not because all people are bad but because the real world is full of real errors.